James R. Koss ~Washington

Water Drop
By James R. Koss
Seattle, Washington: James R. Koss, 2008. One-of-a-Kind.

11 x 3.5" closed; 11 x 28" extended. Letterpress text. Japanese paper collage. Bound with Kodai Nishiki Yuzen Momigami papers over museum board. Hinged with Japanese bookcloth sewn with silk cord.

Original poetry and art by Koss. Layers of collage forming colorful geometric patterns.

Water drop
to old leaf
plied thin
rock tier
smoothed to
shim crack

$3,600

A Compass
by James R. Koss
1994. One-of-a-Kind.

13 x 12 x 3" closed, 17 pages. Fourteen paintings, gouache, ink and watercolor. Each painting 4.75 x 4.24" on 555# Arches. Printed using Van Dijck & Engraver's Roman type. All pages mounted in four-ply museum board mats adhered with PVA Portfolio-style. Contained in a Japanese-style enclosure.

Sandra Kroupa [Special Collections, University of Washington], 'Jim Koss: insistent clarity / bookwork 1992 -1996: "Koss is adept at many kinds of image making: painting, drawing, printmaking, papercuts and collage. He uses oil, graphite, watercolor, acrylic, gouache, and Prismacolor. He creates his own Suminagashi papers, the Japans form of marbling. He does monotypes, monoprints and letterpress. Koss looks to the natural world; texts and images constantly refer to landscape, rock, water and sky. ...

"Koss has also been influenced by the human world. Some work features machinery, ... in a violent world of rattling sounds and shaking motions. In 'A Compass ' (one-of-a-kind, 1994) the machines are more abstract and benign, the compasses helping to find the way home."
$2,350

The Leaping Wheel
By James R. Koss
Seattle, Washington: Piece of the Moon Press, 1986.
One-of-a-Kind.

8.25 x 10 x 5.25"; 78 leaves. Accordion structure. Eve types handset and printed on a platen press. Thirty-four miniature watercolors (2.25 x 2.125") in modified pointillist style . Arches Cover paper. Bound in maroon covered boards with paper title on front board. Laid in beige cloth-covered four-flap wrap box with paper title label on spine.

Thirty-four 6-lined poetic gems (stanzas?) printed in deep black ink, almost incised, on the left half of each double spread are balanced by the thirty-four delicate watercolors on the right, each image composed of short, precise strokes. The Arches Cover paper has been French folded and the watercolors are framed by a window cut in the top sheet and anchored by sewing with long stitches, notably 4 X-shaped stitches about one inch from the viewable corners of each watercolor. They obviously anchor the paper on which the watercolor is painted, which is larger than the painted image. There is indeed more than we can see.

Each stanza takes about as much space is the facing image. One echoes the other without copying. The overall effect is lapidarian, gem-like, quiet, precise and yet warm, even soft, alive. This is a journey of living, as if Walt Whitman had acquired discipline and found Buddha.

A quotation from Melville's Billy Budd with its sense of the concreteness and precision of life's mystery aptly serves as an epigraph:
     ... prescribe to them directness, sometimes far-reaching
     like that of a migratory fowl that in its flight
     never heeds when it crosses a frontier

(SOLD)

Three Forks
By James R. Koss
1996. Edition of 2.

14 x 11 x 1.25" closed; 6 pages. Four images, color monotypes printed from plexiglass painted with printing inks. Images on heavyweight Rives. Van Dijck types handset and printed on a Vandercook #4 letterpress. Text on Canson. Accordion style binding with 4-ply museum board mats. Hinged with sections of Japanese bookcloth sewn together with linen thread. Images and text mounted behind windows in the museum board. PVA adhesive. Hinged with Tyvek. Covers doubled 4-ply museum board wrapped in Japanese bookcloth.

Jim Koss: "Three Forks concerns the headwaters of the Missouri River in Montana, which I have visited often. It's a powerful place, but the book actually involves landscape aspects of that region. I was impressed to think that all of those features are living. I made two of these books, the text is identical, the images are similar but unique to each."
(SOLD)