Always a Story of Leaves: Poems by John Charles Shippey

The text of Always a Story of Leaves by John Charles Shippey is offset and hand-sewn between woodblock printed covers made in collaboration with Lettresauvage Press,  a letterpress studio in Santa Paula, CA. Always a Story of Leaves was released to accompany an exhibit of Shippey’s fine woodwork and painting as part of Bad Exhibition: Value in Art at Art City Gallery in May of 2018.

“The printed and hand bound book of poems by John Charles Shippey Always a Story of Leaves, (Igneus Press 2018) plays upon the metaphor of impermanence – vying between the aesthetic biological transformation of the natural ‘leaf’ yet expressing how all of our stories and tales point to a departure. Shippey’s work, like his yosegi and marquetry wood-turning skills of intricacy, inquires into and probes internal expression – always aware of the beauty of the sometimes abrupt, as well as the negotiating rhizomatic expressed in language, circulating within knots, lines and whirls.

Firstly, some background. John Charles Shippey is one of Southern California’s most important artists, shifting between the intricacy of his Japanese style yosegi-zaiku woodwork, to canvas expressions, and then into the written word. The aesthetics of Always a Story of Leaves pays tribute to book-craft in its construction – in the form of  traditional printing, hand sewn binding and woodblock print.  It reminds us of the value of the hand crafted book in its form but also transcends; expanding and sensual through cream tones and velvet textures, this book-craft pits the artisan ‘real’ against the utility of the masses. ‘Greek Seas’, begins Shippey’s day – the sharpening of tools, the nautical and Homeric contestation of faith switching between rationality and imagination, as Shippey seeks textures for inspiration. His work memorialises the senses – rendering natural scapes while often playing with syntax as in ‘Touch of Black Velvet,’ the wino’s gander through a crumbling fishing town full of smells of carcasses, diesel and salt. Yet Shippey cycles through; apple in pocket, pipe in shirt, narrating his spectrum between metaphysical planetary spaces, zooming back to an immediate awareness on the fleetingness of things. Again, ‘Picture This’, delves deeper as Shippey is a descriptive bard, maintaining his themes in capturing an internal ‘now’, before nature’s moment passes. Perfection and ancestral memory permeate ‘Two Week Window’, as the poet’s Heaney-like discussions with the night also expose his own human vulnerability. This pattern continues into ‘The Celebration’, yet is more situational, as Shippey’s takes you to the moment of his nature – at that time of his choosing, at that place in his soul. Yet his work also turns towards a critique of form as he takes a visceral growl in ‘Holy Wars in Oils’, grinding between description of his canvas representation,  continuing in this pattern of an expression of vulnerability. Always a Story of Leaves culminates with ‘Good Morning’ – a capturing of observations in a moment of time, expanding further than other texts – to express the journey, the global story, while exalting the grandeur of simplicity. This is Shippey’s forte – the grinding of the complex into the simple, the expression of the moment of ‘now’, the unashamedly proud expression of vulnerability, pledging himself to the art of the symmetry as well as the transience of nature.”

Review By Philip Crosbie
June 5th 2018