It feels like a combination of “readiness rush”—that feeling I used to get before a track meet, the feeling of no turning back as I pelt head-first into the moment—and performance anxiety, something exacerbated by doing this project right out here in public.
But where else would I do this? As I’ve been learning more about the historic Book of Hours, how much it connected to one’s secular community as much as one’s private devotional space, I’m struck by how inadvertently appropriate it is to blog the process with you, my virtual community, close at hand.
Anyway, here’s a series of snapshots of the page layout process so far for the Shelly Lowenkopf spread. Do I know what I’m doing? Nope, at least not in the sense of planned, deliberate effort.
For example, I initially thought I’d do these spreads in a horizontal format. But my study of the historic Book of Hours led me back to a vertical format. Interestingly, my quaternary grid becomes lots more cruciform…and also much more like an iconic window…in a vertical format.
I also thought I’d be doing more drawing, but I find myself drawn to collage, at least for now.
Many folks I know could do this sort of page design through digital collage, but for some inchoate reason it’s important to me that I make things tactilely, fingers on the material.
I made a choice to use relatively commonplace material, at least for now. I find most of what makes for an interesting textural surface can be had a mass chain arts-and-crafts stores, and there’s something nicely subversive about browsing the scrap-booking aisles with Shelly’s pages in mind.
I’ll start on Rachel Barenbaum’s spreads this week, and should finish out Shelly’s spreads enough for my course in the next week or so as well.
The process is slow and very intense…not knowing where this is going, being surprised and at times frustrated by what’s happening, feels like a good thing.
To quote from Shelly’s interview, “You don’t have to know why…you have to trust you can.” In the doing, the action, there’s the trust.
