So here, once again, is the seemingly obligatory-for-weblogs end of year roundup.

First off, I made twenty-one posts in 2010, up from fourteen in 2009. I’m happy with the progress in that department, although not everyone may agree!

In March I was in the show The Imperfect Image: The Art of the Handcrafted Print alongside Beth Dow and Osama Esid at IFP Minnesota Center for Media Arts in St. Paul. I was also included in the group shows Land – Unfeigned or Illusory at the Minneapolis Photo Center (for which my image Rain Cloud #2 received a nice comment by the Star Tribune art critic Mary Abbe) and Foot in the Door 4 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. On the other side of the coin, I juried the show Alternatives – Uncommon and Unconventional Processes at the Minneapolis Photo Center which was both fun and interesting to do.

In 2010 I travelled to some great places, some of which I’d never been to before. Death Valley, the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas, Moab, the Bonneville Salt Flats, Salt Lake City, Charleston, Savannah, the Badlands and the area around Ely and the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota a couple of times.

I was very fortunate to receive both an MCBA/Jerome Foundation Book Arts Mentorship Fellowship as well as a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, both of which I’m extremely grateful for. Last year’s trips to northern Minnesota were for the MCBA project, although I’d started working on it before I’d even realised I was a recipient, or for that matter, applied for the grant. I do need to make at least another couple of trips up there in early 2011 though.

At the studio, most of this past year has been spent working on and printing the four volume book set for Cy, The Four Elements. In December we finally delivered five sets of signatures to be bound; four to Campbell-Logan Bindery in Minneapolis and one to Enrico Giannini in Florence, Italy. The images, printed on Japanese gampi paper, will be tipped in.

Despite the doom and gloom, 2010 was an interesting year, but what will 2011 hold for me? More than likely I’ll be concentrating on my MCBA book; there’s a lot of work to be done, especially in printing the twenty images as gravures. So for me, 2011 looks to be the Year of the Book.