Barbara Caruso was born in Kincardine, Ontario, Canada, in 1937. She was first and foremost a visual artist, whose preferred self-descriptor was ‘painter’. She also wrote poetry, and, for a decade, ran Seripress. In 1965 she married Nelson Ball, poet, publisher, and later bookseller, who founded the small poetry press Weed/Flower and whom she always referred to as ‘my poet’.

In 1967 the couple moved to Toronto, where Caruso became involved in the poetry scene which was newly emerging there. During the years when she was painting, Caruso designed covers for little magazines and for Coach House Press and Weed/Flower Press. Over the course of her life Caruso exhibited her large-scale canvases in galleries and museums in Canada, the United States, and Europe. One of her major projects, developed between 1969 and 1983, was the Colour Lock paintings, comprising nine series (141 paintings in total). Her intense preoccupation with colour and line in the paintings of this period informed her collaborations with bpNichol, and manifested itself in the Seripress books.

bpNichol was one of Canada’s most respected non-mainstream poets. He formed the Toronto Research Group with poet Steve McCaffery. He was an innovator in sound poetry and was a member of the Four Horsemen. In 1970 he won the Governor General’s Award for a group of three chapbooks and an anthology he edited titled The Cosmic Chef: an evening of concrete (Oberon Press). This award considerably raised his profile in Canada. One of the chapbooks was The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid, with an illustrative cover by Caruso, and published by Weed/Flower Press. Nichol’s favourite letter was ‘H’, and his favourite colour was blue, both of which have a significant presence in the Seripress collaborations.

Nichol met Barbara Caruso through Nelson Ball in the late 1960s. On one of his visits to their home (which also served as her studio), Nichol observed that one of her paintings reminded him of the panels of a comic strip, and that he would like to draw on it. Horrified at this idea at first, Caruso later thought that something interesting could come of it, and devised a method by which Nichol could do what he wished. This method would lead to their first collaboration, The Adventures of Milt the Morph in Colour.

Seripress began in 1972 and was officially registered in April 1973. It was not, however, a deliberate decision of Barbara Caruso’s to establish a press; Seripress came into being out of necessity. The Adventures of Milt the Morph in Colour, Caruso’s first collaboration with bpNichol, was completed and needed to be published. Caruso’s husband, Nelson Ball, encouraged Barbara to start her own press. She thought carefully about it, wanting to ‘make something under my hand, using my art’.⁴

Barbara Caruso designed Seripress to be profit-making; the profits were used to support her painting. While she ran Seripress, she painted; and all the while she theorized tirelessly about colour, art, and poetry.

During the eleven-year lifespan of Seripress, Caruso published twenty-one titles, all of which were printed at her studio in Toronto. These twenty-one titles are represented in the collection at Sheffield. The final four titles, all by Nichol, were published in 1979, the last one being Movies, which consists of ten loose leaves in a card folder. Later, when Caruso and Nelson moved to Paris, Ontario, she began another small press (small, literally and figuratively) called presspresspress, the output of which she gave away as gifts to friends, never selling any of these productions. The collection at Sheffield contains a full set of these as well.

Milt the Morph is a series of silkscreen prints reminiscent of both the modernist design of Caruso’s Colour Lock paintings (massive four foot by twelve foot canvases) and the classic comic strip grid format. Each of the prints is composed of four colours; each colour is repeated three times in different positions and juxtapositions. The prints feature Milt the Morph, Nichol’s blank-eyed cartoon character who also appears in other works of Nichol’s. Caruso began printing Milt in mid-August 1971 in an edition of twenty-five, finishing in mid-September. The work was completed before Seripress was established, which is why the prints are dated 1971, the title page 1972, and its publication date 1973. The work sold well and was out of print by July 1974, inspiring Caruso and Nichol to continue with their collaboration.

Caruso, we’ll remember, was initially horrified at the thought of Nichol drawing on her paintings as if creating a comic strip. In time, however, she contemplated how he could accomplish this, or at least give the illusion that that’s what he had done. She gave Nichol tracing paper to put over the frame page; Nichol drew his poem and his character on the tracing paper in black felt tip pen. Caruso then cut outside the lines of Nichol’s black lines and separated them from the frames; then she hand-cut the stencils and affixed them to the silkscreen. The frames that had been cut away allowed the colour-shapes to be printed around the lines. Nichol’s black-ink poem and drawings of Milt then appear white (the white of the page), participating in the colour. Milt the Morph, then, is in (or, inside of) colour. If the colour disappeared, the page would be blank.

Some negative reactions to Milt arose from Caruso’s contacts in the art world. One acquaintance at the Art Gallery of Toronto dismissed the work as ‘mixed media’ and advised her not to show Nichol’s drawings to anyone; if she did, she was told, her reputation as an artist would be ruined.⁹

While Caruso’s works are ‘meticulously planar’ and about colour, Nichol’s drawings are most definitely the opposite in character. As seen in the image, left, leaf 2, from the serial poem Aleph Unit (1973), demonstrating Nichol's three-dimensional drawings.

H: An Excursion, the second collaboration between Caruso and Nichol, was begun in 1973, but not published until 1976. Caruso wrote that the work was ‘bp’s idea’.¹² This was not an easy collaboration. She writes: ‘Our “two perceptual systems”, our different temperaments and the uneven division of labour [he was apparently doing very little] became problematic.’¹³ Their collaborative problems reveal clearly the differences between their personal artistic modes of expression.

Nichol chose the letter ‘H’ as the subject of the collaboration and drew it in three dimensions. Caruso could not find a way to make colour meaningful to her using his design. As she put it, she always worked ‘against illusion on the two-dimensional plane’.¹⁴ The volumetric block-letter ‘H’ was never going to work for her, so she and Nichol abandoned that approach. A second approach didn’t work either, which led to further frustration, prompting Caruso to remark: ‘it would be like colouring a picture in a colouring book’.¹⁵

In 1975 Caruso embarked on a new idea for H. The letter starts out as a black-and-white planar ‘H’, then transitions into a coloured planar ‘H’. This second ‘H’ is then divided into three parts, then into five parts, then into seven parts; finally, the ‘H’ transforms into what resembles her Colour Lock Second Series. Caruso could only find meaning if each shape was a colour shape. Because she had not used a three-dimensional block ‘H’, she did not show her idea to Nichol.

She and Nichol ‘saw’ the H differently, which is where the difficulty lay. She states that ‘he seemed wholly engaged by that letter as a symbol or as one thing’.¹⁶ Caruso wanted the ‘H’ to be more than ‘one thing’; she wanted the ‘H’ to be fragmented into a series of colour parts in order to explore, as she put it, ‘relationships and interrelationships of the colours.’¹⁷ Caruso wanted to abandon the collaboration, but Nichol persuaded her to continue.

Finally, in 1976, Caruso presented Nichol with her idea. He liked it. But after the printing was completed Caruso felt uneasy about the work. It dawned on her that the 10″ x 10″ page with its excess margin was wrong; she cropped each sheet to 6″ x 6″ and was pleased with the result.

In response to the set of prints that Caruso had given him Nichol wrote an afterword which was never published. Caruso writes, in reference to the afterword: ‘it seemed our “two perceptual systems” had come together uneasily and were in conflict’. She remarks that Nichol commented only on the value of the colours and not the hue—‘reading the configurations of colours as if they were a Rorschach test’.¹⁸