The Missing Portrait

Tuttle’ s approach to art since the early 1960s has been subtle, idiosyncratic, and intimately poetic. Having developed a unique approach to artmaking throughout the past decades, by employing materials as humble as paper, rope, string, and cloth, at the Brodsky Center, the artist discovered the endless possibilities in handmade paper and the artist’s book format. The Missing Portrait is a poem by John Yau which Tuttle takes as a point of departure for creating a book as a sculptural object. Every aspect of the it is either printed or handmade in paper. For example, the cover is in handmade paper, based on a mold obtained from found three-dimensional toy renditions of a lizard, whose skin seemingly extends to the entire surface. Tuttle extrapolates verses from Yau’s poem and runs them horizontally, a unifying element as each page turn embodies time passing, by engaging a vast array of tactile sensations and emotional responses in the reader/viewer. Tuttle lives and works in in New York, NY, Abiquiu, NM, and Mount Desert, ME. Yau lives and works in New York, NY.