The Book of Ende

Becoming a female illuminator in the late 20th to early 21st century has been arduous, odd, and ultimately, my raison d'etre thus far. Unlike, say, Impressionism or the Renaissance period, any examples I found of exceptional illuminating were extremely rare, and a female's excellent works rarer still. But, they were there. Back in my apprenticeship, St. Martin's Press had annual editorial buying trips to England, in a reverse production process that had us recalibrating equipment to accommodate film flats done the exact opposite of our photographic process used for plate-making on American presses, but I digress.

Murder mysteries were (and still are) an export with an easy audience here in the States, as any real publishing professional will tell you. Just look at the numbers for Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie, and the "Dial __ for Murder" series. My mother is particularly enamored with a British show currently airing on PBS about two older women who plan estate gardens and solve murders, in the exact same format every single week, which is the core demographic for any murder mystery audience.

Edward Gorey famously illustrated an opening spot for the introduction to the PBS "Masterpiece Theater" murder mystery series, in a gothic pen-and-ink style that had the 90s graduating classes of RISD's Illustration department completely under his spell: a cool, hermetic character who left New York City after his own career in publishing for Provincetown, to create work reminiscent of the the 1900-1930s Art Nouveau revival, but I digress again. 

At work, we produced a series of murder mysteries by British authors that I still have on my bookshelves, with one stand-out selection: "The Apothecary Rose". Here, we find a female herbalist working in a medieval abbey garden attached to a cloister, who also solves murders most foul. Back then, the weapon of choice was often poison secreted from the abbey garden or her own apothecary shelves, for death-dealing instead of healing. 

The same fictional construct used in murder mysteries was the actual historical context for female illuminators working in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: artists who were either raised in the family business of making books attached to a prestigious monastery, or the nuns working in the scriptorium of their own monasteries. It was uncommonly educated and rare for anyone to read, write, and paint with such skill, but for a woman? Well, that's another story entirely. 

Happy Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, to my illuminated readers of 2016.

Poor Richard's Almanack

I didn't know anyone like me growing up, except through books and magazines. My older cousin was married to a graphic designer who designed HBO catalogs in the city back in the 80s (like a weekly "T.V. Guide" for cable), and then hand-painted wooden duck decoys at their home as her "creative outlet". Not exactly what I wanted to do as an adult, but then again, I had no idea how to tell people around me who I was and what I'd become: "sort of like Benjamin Franklin", which would've been met at the dinner table with lots of eye-rolling and violent denials. 

Usually, my brothers just called me "gay" or a "retard", so I spent most of my childhood in my bedroom with my best friends who lived in the books they wrote just for me; that's how it felt. It was warm, intimate, and always understood by me, which helped with the adversity in my childhood home that's also the world we live in. It's never easy to innovate, or "to become", or to be that thing people fear the most: powerful, educated, and righteous. It wouldn't have done me any good to talk about something so rare and special that eludes so many people for so long. Why chase after it?

Luckily, my dad loves history, government, politics, the military, and quotes, which gave me the plug-ins I needed to create space for my work to grow; work that was rough and under-funded so it would seem amateurish, though for the ferocity of the concepts underneath. "Concept is key" is one of his favorite sayings, along with this one attributed to Ben Franklin: "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." He and I were the only regular nighttime sleepers awake before dawn to the awesome silence of a tense house so often governed by my mother's manic cleaning sprees and dramatic scenes, especially the evening before another stress-filled holiday that felt more like torture than celebration to us.

Then, we would have an excuse to go hiking in the woods before anyone else in the house woke up with their needs that took precedence over two "morning people" openly disparaged in a dreamy, late-night t.v. world that made chronic insomnia seem like this hip, new thing. Where would we have been without history and a few good quotes to back us up? I still go to bed way before it's considered "cool", to take quiet morning photos of empty streets filled with big dark houses under beautiful Hudson Valley sunrises. 

Wish you were here.