“It’s hard at first to start ripping and drawing and painting in a book,” says Oak Park artist Polly Smith. “But once you get past that first rip, it’s easy.” Since she began incorporating text, photos, paintings, and collages into the pages of existing tomes–mostly used hardbacks–two years ago, she’s completed about 100 “altered” books. “It’s a wonderful way to take things that aren’t being used and turn them into something people can look at and enjoy,” she says.
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Although Smith has taken a few classes in bookbinding, printmaking, and other paper arts, she considers herself a self-taught artist. A classically trained cellist with a degree from Carnegie Mellon, she had a brief music career subbing in the orchestras of the Pittsburgh Opera and Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. But three weeks after she and her husband, a mechanical engineer, moved to Oak Park in 1993, she got pregnant; at seven months she was too big to play cello. To pass the time she started drawing and doodling, and stuck with it after giving birth to the first of her two sons. “I was home with this baby all of a sudden,” she says, “and started doing art when I had a few minutes here or there, making a card or a little book or something.”
Anything from religious medals and scraps of vintage paper to fruit stickers and junk mail can wind up in her pieces. “I even accepted literature from Jehovah’s Witnesses once, because I knew there could be something interesting in there,” she says. “But now I’m marked, and they keep coming back.”
Smith will lead a workshop on altered books on Sunday, January 4, from 12:30 to 4 at the Paper Source, 919 W. Armitage. It’s $50; to register call 773-525-7300. She’ll lead another on art journaling on January 18 at the Paper Source at 1109 Lake in Oak Park. It’s $60; call 708-445-7700. For more on Smith’s work see pollymade.com.
