Imagination Bodies Forth
Eastern repousse front cover of a one of a kind, long stitch book with calligraphic hand lettering over a giclee printed montage of original collages, and an acid etched copper back cover Copper sheet, handmade and photo papers, Japanese stick inks, gouache text: William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene i, lines 2-22
6″ x 6″ x 2″, height of repousse on portrait is 1″
There is something truly magical about creating, about making things. It makes me feel like a conjurer, summoning up an object from an idea. Of course between the inspiration and the manifestations can be ages of what is sometimes fun and sometimes grueling work.
This one-of-a-kind book took 14 months to complete. It encompassed my most involved Eastern repoussé piece to date, the copper front cover portrait of my son Skyler at age 11. I first drew the portrait with Prismacolor pencils on goatskin vellum. Before it was complete I knew I had to hammer it in metal and create something intimate and interactive, a view to his thoughts on the inside via my perspective from the outside.
Skyler had recently become a Shakespeare fan (no one does bawdy humor like The Bard), so I began researching passages that would fit my perspective of his thoughts and dreams as he stood on the edge of childhood, looking toward his teens. When I found Theseus’ speech from Midsummer Nights Dream, I knew it was perfect even if I did rip it out of context just a bit.
The text was taken from the 1600 First Folio held by the Bodleian Library with contemporary English spelling applied. The breaking of the lines into this layout was inspired by the Bard but was, alas, subject to the whims of the artist. The calligraphic lettering is a broad-edged hand that I began developing in 2012 and is inspired by a particular style of Arabic writing from antiquity.
The images in the book block behind the hand lettering are original collages and drawings and a few NASA photos that I digitally manipulated into giclée prints to form a continuous set of pages.
The Eastern repoussé process on the copper front cover involves free hand hammering 24 gauge sheet metal alternately from the front and back with specialized tools. Eastern repousse dates back to at least the ancient Egyptians (the process employed to create Tutankhamun’s mask) and is a technique I’ve revived for contemporary use in jewelry and functional objects.
The greatest challenge of the book was bringing together these rather disparate elements of Eastern repousse portraiture: timeless language, surreal images, and cryptic lettering to create a sense of visual depth worthy of Shakespeare’s text and equal to the literal technical height of the Eastern repoussé. Together these elements reflect my fathomless love for my son as I watched awestruck, his metamorphosis from child to teen to adult.
Book text: Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene i, lines 2-22
More strange than true: I never may believe
These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
