To complete my presentation of the first of, well, I’m not sure how many manuscripts I’ll produce of my Atternen Juez Talen, aka in old English, The Eternal Jew’s Tale, here’s a presentation of some of the images I painted as decorative details. Enjoy!
Following up on my post of May 2, which showed images of the binding of an illuminated manuscript I recently produced, in this post you can view a slideshow of some of the illumination work (gold leaf decorations) in the book.
Viewing problems?? I use Chrome to produce my blog posts, and I just noticed that Firefox doesn’t present the images properly, or at all. Please contact me if you’re having this problem too, so I can notify my web hosting company.
In this, and 2 or 3 following posts, I’ll be presenting images of some notable details of an illuminated manuscript I produced of the opening scenes of a long narrative poem I recently completed, entitled The Atternen Juez Talen (The Eternal Jew’s Tale).
I began working on this manuscript over a year ago, using a pre-bound empty book that had been given to me as a gift by my wife Nancy some number of years ago. The paper appears to be a Nepalese tissue with minimal sizing (“size” is a technical term that means ‘surface sealant’; unsized paper will allow ink to feather, therefore making it unsuitable for most calligraphy). Thus, I had to size each sheet. I used a thinned acrylic medium as my size. If you’re curious about my decision to use acrylic, contact me.
The sizing process was complicated for 3 reasons:
1. wetting the sheets meant they would become buckled and wrinkled upon drying;
2. since sizing is glue of one sort or another, it meant that if I put the pages in a press to avoid buckling, they would stick together into a solid block; and
3. since the book was already bound, pressing each sheet individually would have been prohibitively time consuming.
I’ll spare you the details of my solution, but needless to say, for this 156 sheet book it required over 2 months to complete the sizing project. But the result was quite nice. The acrylic size made the sheets somewhat pearlescent and translucent, which I liked a lot. But it meant I could only write on one side of each sheet. So suddenly, my 312 page book (156 sheets, both sides) became a 156 page book. No worries. It kept me plenty busy for another 10 months.
The production process was rather straight forward. First I did the calligraphy, using India ink. Then, using water colors, I painted small portraits on pages where the right margin of the text was wide enough to allow a miniature. Then I illuminated all the section breaks with various versions of a sunburst. There were about 20 of these illuminations. After that, I did a number of full and half-page illustrations, again using water colors. Finally, I bound the book in blue leather. Since I used a chrome-based tanned leather, it wouldn’t take gold tooling, so I painted the title on the front and spine, using acrylic paint.
In this post I’ll present images of the binding, the title page, and the end papers.
Enjoy!
Just back from a short trip to Maryland’s eastern shore. During our stay, Josh, Jonah, Nancy and I took a delightful stroll around Burton Island, about a 2 mile trail thru typical wetlands and forest. Of the photos I took, here’s a collection I’ve named “Patterns.” I hope you enjoy it.
One of the great museums in Turkiye is the Turk ve Islam, featuring Turkish and Islamic arts. Below you can view a slideshow of some of my favorite exhibits, primarily manuscripts, plus some carpets. Enjoy.
Here’s a slideshow of some pictures I took while visiting Istanbul in February, 2024.
Beginning the illustration and other decorative work on my Atternen Juez Talen manuscript, having completed the calligraphic work.
Here’s the title page with illustrations about 2/3 done:
Saadia and Batkol, the Atternen Ju and his wife
Below you can view a few alternate versions of the images I have produced to illustrate my weekly Eternal Jew blog post at The Times of Israel (TOI). As of this week, I have posted 105 episodes. If you want to see these images in their literary context, here’s a link to my blog at TOI:
Some months ago I began a project to produce an illuminated manuscript of the poetry version of the Atternen Juez Talen. A prose, standard English version is being published in a weekly episodic format at the Times of Israel [https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/stephen-berer/], but the original poetry version remains largely inaccessible to the public. It seems the world is not yet ready for my visionary talen.
Therefore, I decided to produce an enduring and perhaps even elegant version as a stand-alone work of art. When completed, this illuminated manuscript will still only be about 1/3 to 1/4 of the whole poem, but I hope to illuminate the rest of the poem in further volumes. God Willing.
Below you can see page 103, which I penned today.
Calligraphic version, yet to be illuminated and illustrated
As I experimented with a famous 1848 photo of Edgar Allen Poe, now in the public domain, to come up with an image for the 61st episode of the Eternal Jew’s Tale (found at the Times of Israel, at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-eternal-jews-tale-61-a-raven/) my “darkroom work” produced the following collection of images. For your edification…
My wife and I are visiting NYC, staying in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood in Brooklyn (F train to Carroll St).. I’d call this one of New York’s best “Little Italys” with some completely fabulous shops (Caputo’s Fine Foods is a Mich 3 market in my book, and Monteleone’s Bakery is right up there too, including perfect espresso).
When we arrived at Carroll St station for the first time and walked the 5 or so blocks to our 4 day apartment rental, we were bemused by the many religious shrines in the yards. I’d never seen anything like it. Sure, we’ve seen religious shrines in lots of yards, but here, every 2nd or 3rd house had a shrine. I loved it!! Today is our last day here. I decided I just had to make a photo record of some of the shrines, and here it is. Mind you, these photos were all taken along just 2 1/2 blocks, and on 1 1/2 of those blocks I only took photos on ONE side of the street, not both sides!!
As I was taking one of these photos (#4), the owner of the house came out, clearly pleased that I was photographing his Madonna. He apologized for the algae growing on it, but I told him it looked like it had been painted to bring out the shadows. Nature as artist. Our conversation lasted hardly more than a minute or two, but I think we both walked away elevated, feeling like we’d made a meaningful connection. Well, it was meaningful to me, at least.
Oh, I should mention that the last 5 slides aren’t really shrines, but like the shrines they ARE public-private statements that are an active part of the neighborhood’s personality. And there are a couple of slides in which the “shrine” is just a beautifully gardened yard.
What a great place to stay while visiting NYC. What a great place to live.
Here’s my Carroll Gardens Shrines slideshow:
For the last 7 months I’ve been working on producing an amulet for my grandson, Jonah. It involved creating the design, laying the gold, painting the image, and calligraphing an inscription. The primary materials were calfskin parchment, gold leaf, acrylic paint, and ink. The whole project took 95 hours. Here’s a 3 minute video compiled from the photos I took as my work progressed. As you will see, progress was not always straightforward and satisfactory, but I’m very pleased with the results.
Here’s a 20 second video, giving an impressionistic picture of the blizzard hitting NYC today. I created it from a single photo that I put thru a series of progressive transformations.
I never much liked Wally Stevens’ poetry, but, hell, I’m not above stealing a good title!
Walking in Riverside Park yesterday I sited a redtail, and snapped a photo of her (him? them?). Interestingly, New York has one of the highest densities of raptors in the US. Lots of squirrels and rats to eat, I guess. Anyway, here are 13 ways of looking at that redtail…
I was skyping the other day and I guess the person onscreen was in a bright light: his face was totally washed out. I took a screen shot, which turned out to have a strong blue shading, and from that I worked up this series of transformations. FYI, they are not presented here in the order in which they were produced. This is not a chronological development of the image, but I did try to present a sort of visual narrative in this ordering.
Always glad to get your feedback, critical or otherwise…
I continue to experiment with electronic transformations of abstract forms. Here is a series I recently produced.
This 16 second video shows the development of an illumination for the Megillat Esther Josh and I are producing. Here’s the text of the video’s voice-over:
This illumination is based on a golden drinking vessel from the Achaemenid period. Conceivably, Xerxes, Achashverosh, could have used this vessel during the festivities described in the Book of Esther. I produced the image using gold leaf and water color.
As Josh closes in on the last pages of the manuscript (and I fall further and further behind him with my work), I thought you might like to see a recent rough-out page he produced, to fine tune the spacing before committing to parchment. Here’s ten versions of it thru various ‘lenses’.
From my collection entitled ‘8 Miles High’, here’s a series of transformations of a photo taken from the plane as we approached Phnom Penh.
Josh and I began work on the Megillah in early January, 2017. Since then I’ve kept a fairly careful log of my illumination work. Last week I crossed the 500 hour mark at about the same time as completing my 20th illumination. Here’s a group portrait:
