Shelter In Place

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

inklings

Most people on my mailing list only know of me as a letterpress printer. But, having retired from the printshop, last year I published a memoir of my life before that, as a union carpenter. This year I’ve published a collection of my art and writings from the time of the Pandemic, and I think its zany contents are unfamiliar to people apart from my close friends and family. So I thought to post a couple of bulletins as a preview.

For over fifty years I’ve experimented with and studied media for fusing images and text, e.g. Wm. Blake’s illuminated work, Apollinaire’s calligrammes, N. American petroglyphs, comic artists & Tang Dynasty painter/poets. I was particularly inspired by the work of Kenneth Patchen, whose drawing-poems were so experimental and childlike that his words had vatic powers. I’ve drawn on many traditions, but always pull up short of mimicking or wanna-being. But will confess to envy when I look at Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese writing. Our alphabet is so…plain.

At times words come as if etched ahead of time and I leave them alone as calligraphic messages. But I am also influenced by the asemic artists who create ‘texts’ without semantic meaning nor even an alphabet. The method was/is improvisational immediacy. I rarely have an idea before putting ink to paper. But I think of them all as poems.

The images alongside here are from the book. You can see that the top piece is not readable language, and the ink is racing ahead of any thought. It’s part of a whole series I did in that year using a quill pen and homemade oak gall ink.

The second image is a line drawing with words appearing as vernacular & oracular messages. These kinds of drawings sometimes come to me with whole texts, often infused by my fascination with petroglyphs.

The last one is a pen&ink drawing-poem that found a metaphoric life as a mirror of itself. The poem ends up saying ‘don’t collect poems and put pins through them as if for an insect display.’ And of course it has itself been collected with all the other pages in my book, which is a sort of a merry-go-round in a larger collection.

I’ll go a bit further with this next time, but meanwhile, you can buy the book by clicking’purchase’ in the right margin above.

– ej

Cover Story I

In which the author responds to readers who have asked why he chose the Breughel painting ‘Tower of Babel’ for the cover of his carpentry memoir, Journeyman’s Dues.

The straightforward answer is that Breughel depicts the tower described in Genesis 11 that was built when the people of earth spoke one language. As it grew closer to heaven, the Lord decided they were overreaching, invading his space, showing off, and probably would do all sorts of things even more competitive with his own powers. So he shattered that one language and the people could no longer coordinate the work and scattered to the seven corners of the world. I’ve read many parts of the Bible but always felt this was the nastiest and pettiest action of that god…and that’s saying a lot.

That’s still not straightforward enough, so here:
I identify with the builders who spoke the one language. I believe there still is one language. I absolutely love Breughel and that painting.

My book is about a young man obsessed with language and poetry who worked on giant buildings learning the one language of tools and leverage. And learning how to be a journeyman in the archaic fusic of union and skill. The book itself is a building, with many storeys, that took 60 years to complete.

Now for the long roundabout meander.
In 2014, my wife and I went to the Low Countries, specifically Amsterdam, Bruges, and Antwerp. I had two goals: to visit the Plantin Printing Museum in Antwerp, and to see as many Breughel, de Hooch and Bosch paintings as possible. The effect was more than I could have anticipated, life-altering. I loved discovering some mesmerizing works, like Breughel’s fantastical Dulle Griet in Antwerp. But that same day I also spent hours in the Plantin Museum which is the oldest intact printing establishment in the world, begun in the 16th Century. All the equipment is preserved as it had been centuries before, so you could walk right up to the old hand presses and the rows of type cases.

It was weaving into one tapestry for me…the warp of the metal type presses…and the weft of the paintings. There were rooms where you could see the books printed in the 16-17th Centuries, and their rich typographic artistry. In 1570, Plantin produced one of the masterpieces of early printing, a Bible with text simultaneously in Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew. The name for this kind of version is polyglot bible. Let that sink in.

When I got home and busy in my printshop again, I was obsessed with that tapestry of words and imagination, and bought an art book of Breughel’s work. There I discovered his Tower of Babel for the first time, the awesome yet ordinary depiction of that giant construction, with intricate engineering devices, half-finished galleries and stairs leading nowhere. It was teeming with people in very natural poses of the actual work. I got lost in the detail to the degree that I wanted to just sign up for the crew. How can I help? Well young fellow, said the 500-year old superintendent, how about the finish work? We need to get all these words to the top before that tyrant smites us again.

I spent the next couple of months ‘pitching in’, as best I could, building a two-dimensional tower of metal type and imagining the omniliterate tongue that would get us to the pinnacle that the overseer called heaven. We just wanted to SEE EVERYTHING. Is that so bad you big bully? Here’s the foundation:

By the time I finished & printed an edition, the tower had grown to 16” high, & I had used 45 different fonts, ending with a medley of 6-points.

I guess one could say that I’ve been obsessed with the metaphor of the towers of words and always aligned myself with the heresy of panhumanism. Maybe there never was one protohuman language but there most certainly is one humanity, still painfully burdened with patriarchs, bullies & demagogues. The tower of Babel was the One Big Union.