Everything Became Illuminated

I can't remember a time when I couldn't read, write, and draw. As a little girl, stories and pictures poured out of me, anytime I wanted them to. I said to my 4th grade teacher that I was writing a book that I would publish someday, and she huffed at me, "Yeah, sure you will." I also knew from an early age that I wasn't a cynic, working a teaching gig for summers off and a chance to crush childhood dreams. That summer, I taught myself to use the old manual typewriter my parents kept downstairs. What a beast. To this day, I hate typing, and lo and behold, I am nobody's secretary. Last year, I sent around some of my illustrations with a revised version of those rhymes I'd written as a child, that my mother saved from a sketchbook of mine. A literary agent told me it was the best submission she'd read in a long time.

My parents said I begged them to go to school so I could read. I went to a pre-school before kindergarten, and after-school programs at the local library. I loved the cool quiet of libraries, searching for books in card catalogs. I learned to research expertly, skills that amaze people today—the quickness with which I can find information, process it, coalesce it, design it, and publish it. But growing up, I had no idea what it was. I wasn't a "painter" in the traditional sense: still lives and portraits grew tiresome. There are so many out there already. What was I really adding to the world, that any of the Dutch painters hadn't said definitively centuries ago? It was a closed conversation for me. I wasn't strictly a "writer" either. I could care less about the finer points of grammar and punctuation. Those were items for teachers to find and correct, as they scribbled over sheets of loose leaf paper with big red pens. As far as I was concerned, it was a lesser talents attempt to have sway over artistic output. I sure as heck wasn't a journalist or an editor, so...what was this?

I left home for college at 17. I took a job at the campus library around the same time I started to wrap my mind around the world of professional art. As I poured over issues of Step-by-Step Graphics and Communication Arts in the periodical section where I worked, I had no idea how to get those jobs, but I knew I could do the work in the magazines. I started taking my first college-level studio classes, and I did really well. The trade journals identified most of the work I saw as "illustrations", so I made the firm decision to apply to those programs at elite schools. At the same time, I was busy fulfilling liberal arts requirements, especially English Lit and Art History. I actually liked written tests, essays, and papers, because I could fully express myself, providing reasoned arguments with footnoted scholarly references. How freeing!

One afternoon, in a large, darkened lecture hall packed with freshmen, I saw a slide of an illuminated manuscript, and every synapse in brain lit up at the sight of it. "Ohhhh...", I breathed to myself and sat up straight, moving my hands across the desk, gripping the top edge and tilting forward my seat. The ground shook for me, intellectually. A conversion of elements combined together. The class went on, oblivious to my newfound awareness: the Bible, Johann Gutenberg, the advent of the printing press, the wide dispersion of information, William Blake, Benjamin Franklin...Yeah!! This made sense to me. When I did a Google search for this piece, I found a link to the Oneonta Art History class I took that is still taught today, with the same great, classical curriculum: http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth109/arth109_sl17.html.

I find The Book of Kells to be the most beautiful piece of art I have ever seen. It just does it for me, in a way that no other art form does. I knew I had to see it in person. And like so many things in my vocational life, a trip landed itself at my feet. My college boyfriends' brother started working as a baggage handler at Aer Lingus. We got really cheap tickets to Europe, and we were off one summer to Amsterdam first, then Dublin, then Galway. It was the last of the pre-Euro days, in the early 90s, when travel was a lot less frequent. Typically, I am a nervous flier, but as I found myself sipping champagne in my seat, I felt a calm wash over me that was beyond the alcohol. We flew overseas with a gaggle of young priests and nuns, and the actor Brian Dennehy, who had supposedly acquired a pub in Dublin. 

 

We stayed in an upscale bed and breakfast in the Ballsbridge section of Dublin, that had a hole in the bathroom floor, next to the toilet, which served as a shower drain. The proprietress knocked on our door early afternoon, asking us to draw back the curtains to our room, because she didn't want the neighbors to gossip. She asked us if we were married, and we told her we were engaged. Thankfully I always wore my Claddagh ring in the correct way, because she didn't turn us out. She did, however, give us the times for mass services on Sunday at the church on the corner. She was relieved we were Catholic. We asked her about visiting Trinity College. She discouraged us from going, saying it was a tourist trap, not worth the time.

There was no internet page to consult, or cell phones to call ahead, so early Monday morning, we arrived at the college to see the most famous Illuminated Manuscript on the planet, The Book of Kells. And the library was closed. I had travelled all this way to see it, and the next day we were scheduled to fly to Galway. I steeled myself, and gave my boyfriend the bad news. He ranted, raved, sulked, pouted, argued, but to no avail. There was nothing else I could do but stay on another day. Back then, there was no fancy exhibit. You simply paid a small fee, then climbed the stairs to the long room, where the oldest books are kept. I found it to be the most beautiful library I have ever seen. The shelves stretched up and down, punctuated with staircases, ladders, annotations, all manner of arcane reading material. 

As we made our way down the hall, towards the end of the room where it is kept, I remember craning over the velvet ropes that blocked tourist access to the shelves, just to get a look at the cracked leather bindings. After a quick scan back and forth, I leaned over to graze my hand over the tallest and oldest bound Bible I had seen, next to the Gutenbergs. I knew I would remember this moment for the rest of my life: the light that poured through the windows, and the window that opened in my heart. I felt less alone than I had ever felt in my life. Sure enough, when we got to The Book of Kells, it was opened to a rather plain text page, but I didn't care. I saw with my eyes that it was possible to make a book worthy of veneration and importance. 

My then-boyfriend spent the days' bus ride grumbling that I had ruined his trip, but I didn't care. I did it for me, and I knew it was the right thing to do. He stopped pouting about 3 hours in, as we giggled about the country people who got on the bus with geese and chickens. Ireland was not a frequently travelled place at that time. It was the most fun we had. When we got to Galway, the owner of the bed and breakfast we booked came to get us in her car, after we called her from the tourist center, soaking wet from a downpour. Within half an hour, we had our feet by a cheerful, roaring fire in her house, with delicious tea and gorgeous, handmade scones. Thank you, Berna Kelly :) http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g186609-d254120-r50012494-Devondell-Galway_County_Galway.html.

After transferring to art school, I still had tons of exploring. I didn't like calligraphy; that's for cards. It wasn't graphic design either. I didn't want to just set the type and lay out other peoples' work. I wanted to write and make pictures. The closest courses I could find were for children's book illustration, but most illustrators are content to have someone else write the books they create images for. Nah, it's not that. I had a voice. I took a class in Artists Books, but it was a fine art class about creative expression. I did learn about bookbinding, acquiring a bone folder and the thread used to sew signatures. I worked and took classes and graduated without bonding to any single creative vision offered at the school. I had no idea what the modern equivalent of an illuminator was.

What to do? I had the beginnings of an illustration portfolio and a solid photography portfolio. My first two interviews were as darkroom technicians for two very famous female photographers. I didn't get those, because, you know, I had my own style. A good friend from high school and I were chatting on the phone about our job searches as recent grads, and I told him I had applied to publishing positions, too. One of our classmates worked PR for a house, so when I got the call for the interview, he introduced me to my new boss and gave her my resumé. So it began in earnest. I saw book design for the first time in my life and that made sense to me. I always wondered where artisans and scribes worked in these times, and here was the answer: Publishing.

I became the first artist to work in their Manufacturing department, so
I set about learning the ropes. Not much time into my apprenticeship,
I moved upstairs to the Art Department to learn about the craft of book cover design. It's taken me awhile to accept that I am not some relic from the past, nor a creative anachronism, but the real life version of an artist who is derived from those ancient traditions. It can be challenging finding the right niche, but when I do, everything clicks into place. It's a rare life that's often hard to explain to outsiders, but I wouldn't have it any other way. And I owe it all to The Book of Kells.

In memoriam Bernard (Barney) Corbett.

Me on the steps of the Trinity College Library, Monday morning.

Céad míle fáilte.