Ward Schumaker, a San Francisco-based artist known for the iconic illustrations he's created for books and magazines, has recently been making one-of-a-kind hand painted books. Encouraged by his wife, artist Vivienne Flesher, he has devoted much of his time over the last five years to this pursuit. In an email interview, Ward talked about the art and process of making books - and about the paintings he has made based on a book entitled I Am Big Heaven, which are on display at the Stir Gallery in Shanghai, China.

Peggy Roalf: What prompted you to create hand painted one-of-a-kind books rather than printed limited editions?
Ward Schumaker: I did two limited edition letterpress books for the Yolla Bolly Press, but on the death of James Robertson, of the husband-wife proprietors, his wife Carolyn decided not to continue. Then I started doing my own books. I tried working with letterpress but I didn't have the right attitude for it; it just seemed too clean for me. My printing was actually so bad that I started painting it over and finally decided to do away with the printing and go straight to the brush. In fact, it spurred me on to return to painting, which is where I originally started out.

PR: The combinations you create of hand lettering and painted textures is often very three dimensional and involves repeating words and letterforms. Can you describe how you handle the texts?
WS: I often make hand-cut stencils for the lettering. In the latest ones, I was inspired by those beautiful book covers Louise Fili was doing in the 1980s and 90s. I borrowed her idea of having a rule passing through the tops or bottoms of the letters. As well as being an artistic device, it keeps them from falling apart as I paste them down, and I can maintain the letter spacing as I want it.

My first hand-painted books were non-objective explorations of the paste medium. But as much as I love abstractions, being an illustrator has created a need in me for the work to mean something. So I turned to my daily meditation practice and worked from there. Some books are simply a mantra, a word or phrase, repeated for 64 pages with the same stencil. The hypnotic similarity, and the differentiations between the spreads, is what interests me.

Some of my other books bring in texts from The Dhammapada or other spiritual writings. Elixir Refused is based on the battle at Kurukshetra, from the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu text. It also includes the final scene of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, which I find confounding and fascinating. I hope people find the book funny, as it ends with the spiritual seeker forgoing heaven because he finds it boring.

PR: Is I Am Big Heaven, the work on display in Shanghai, the actual book?
WS: When I finished Big Heaven, I decided to make large-scale adaptations of the spreads as paintings. Jianwei Fong, who owns the Stir Gallery, liked them and invited me to have a show. This worked out really well because it's nearly impossible to get books - hand made or printed - into China without paying huge import duties. In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery has printed a limited edition of Elixir Refused, scaled down from the original size. Illustrations: Top two, I Am Big Heaven, the book. Bottom left, painting adapted from the book.

Stir Gallery is hosting a reception for the artist on Saturday, June 9, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm. The exhibition runs through June 26^th.