"Hold me up to the light; you will see poems. Hold me in the dark; you will see light." Erica Jong .
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"Hand Book" special hand-worked edition.
Calligraphy, projected over the hands that wrote it, literally forms an "illuminated manuscript".

US$ 180 including worldwide shipping
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This is a kind of self-portrait, my calligraphy being an expressive projection of my self, but here it's projected back over the hands that wrote it. I used a digital projector to beam slides of my calligraphy over my hands in an otherwise dark room and photographed the results.

Above: Sgraffiti in hand-painted 140lb watercolor paper, preparing for a unique print.

Each print combines creative interplay between manual and digital realms. Manual dexterity is written all over this work. But it also features digital projection, photography and editing. Yet hands are the original digital carrier, (digit = finger; digital originally meant "pertaining to the fingers"). Here I illuminate my ten manual digits with a digital projector, providing a color-wash of the fruit of my handwork.

 

 

I display my hands like pages of an open book; an illuminated manuscript literally since the calligraphy is projected light. Most writing is indecipherable, but "hand book" is clearly written across my palms with "digital manual" written underneath. If hands might be a book then certainly it would be a digital manual. (Latin; manus = hand; digitalis, from digitus = finger)

T W O   E D I T I O N S   A V A I L A B L E

I am offering this print in two limited editions. One is a 13"x19" edition; high resolution with archival inks & paper; but this is a larger 16" x 23" hand-worked edition limited to just 80 prints on heavy watercolor paper that I paint with white gesso prior to printing. Textured brush-strokes follow the shape of the image and I scratch handwriting into the gesso whilst wet. The surface is alive with hand-made marks. It varies from matt watercolor paper, to a gloss finish over the painted areas. These prints also feature hand torn edges on all sides for a deckle effect. There's a comparative list between the two editions below.

"Hold me up to the light; you will see poems. Hold me in the dark; you will see light." Erica Jong

The polyrhythmic writing detail above favors a musical flow of space over more legible, traditional letter-forms. Very fast energetic pen-strokes and compressed off-parallel letter-forms generate a "shuffle" rhythm that occasionally expands to open asymmetric trapezoidal spaces. It's a dancing rhythm that expands and contracts. The undulating direction of the lines follows an improvised sense of achieving spatial harmony; but also flows upward in sensitivity to the uplifting sentiment of the text. This text, also the illegible layers on the hands, is from the poem "We Learned" by Erica Jong.

©2018 Denis Brown  |  www.quillskill.com