Pop Goes the Artist!

Finally finished the two calligraphy projects I’ve been thinking about/planning for at least a month. I went home to my paints this weekend and in an astonishing burst of inspiration and productivity, produced not one, but two finished pieces.

This is the piece I did for my church’s silent auction later this month. “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” is actually a very long prayer, so I just picked the verse that most people have heard before. It has a nice symmetry about it as well. My inspiration for this piece was straight out of the book of Kells, which I consider the pinnacle of monastic manuscript achievement. (I’m not kidding. It’s amazing. I have the whole thing on CD-ROM.) I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out, although I think I could have done a better job with the alignment of the text on the right side and with making the letters more Celtic. On the whole, however, I think it was a success and I’m particularly fond of the capital C. It’s double-matted in a lovely tan with black, which looks much better than it sounds. (watercolor and ink on watercolor paper, 10×8″)

This is the piece I did for my old middle school. I know I had originally decided on the Anima Christi, which is a beautiful prayer, but it’s very long and I just wouldn’t have had time to do it justice. I think this works just as well though, considering that “Thy kingdom come” may as well be the school’s mantra. When I went there, we had to write “TKC” (for “thy kingdom come”) at the top of all of our papers, and as far as I know that hasn’t changed, so this will (hopefully) be a hit. On a more technical note, I have no idea why the image is tinged slightly blue on the right side–a quirk of the scanner, I guess, but in real life the paper is heavy cream-colored pastel paper. My inspiration for this was purely medieval, in particular this incredible collection of pages from some medieval book. Click a page at random and you won’t be disappointed; they’re all pretty impressive. (Thank you, Columbia University.) This one has a double mat of red and gold, which looks pretty rockin’, I must say. (ink and acrylic gouache, 5×8″)

I’ll be eager to find out how much each of these goes for, the second one in particular. If these are a hit, I’ll probably do something with a literary, rather than religious, twist for the big library fundraiser next year. We shall see.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Other Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.