Illuminated Manuscripts in the Age of Social Media and Texting (2024-5)

I was holed up in Burgundy as Covid began to rage in 2020. In a corner of the vaulted furnace room of my house, I began working with gouache, tiny brushes, gold leaf, and calligraphy pens, standing in my own scriptorium in a little village in the Morvan forest.

This is my first foray into the world of illuminated manuscripts. My work for many years has incorporated text and art-historical imagery. But I didn’t realize until I was well into my new work that the decision to mash up texting, social media, and an ancient art form was eerily in tune with the times as well as my own history.

Glowing screens on cellphones, tablets, and laptops were, I realized in retrospect, the obvious illuminated manuscripts of the digital age. Back in Medieval times, the best they could do to generate light was gold leaf.

We live in a fast-paced age, yet everything ground to a halt as a result of Covid. Contact with others became difficult, even dangerous. Illuminated manuscripts seemed to be an invitation to slow down when the world is going a mile a minute. I surrendered to the labor-intensive techniques seen in precious pages hidden away in rare book rooms.

When I stumbled into this rather neglected art form, my manuscripts reflected my intense desire to communicate something of our radically changed lives. Now in 2024, working in my new studio on the top floor of my house as I write this, I see how they allow me to give expression to melancholy subjects, political frustrations, and the lunacy of everyday life.

All sheets are 22-1/2” x 22-1/2” gouache, ink, 22 karat gold leaf on Arches 300g paper.

Hey, Barking up the wrong tree!, 2024
[Six of the most poisonous trees in the world]

Some Golden Door, 2025

[Text exchange between Ken Aptekar & Emma Lazarus who wrote the poem, The New Colossus, 1883, which is inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, designed by French sculptor Frederic-August Bartholdi.]

TEXT: Ken Aptekar is at Statue of Liberty January 20, 2025
KA: Nobody’s listening, say it again, Emma.
EL: [Emma Lazarus]
Give me your tired your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore: send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
KA: You and Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, what you wrote, what he made, what she stands for. Hope, welcome, freedom.
KA: Some golden door.

[Source: Book of Kells, 9th c. Celtic Gospel book, Ireland (or Scotland)]

Executive Orders (This is Great?), 2025

Text: fires prosecutors in cases against Trump or the January 6 rioters, requires blanket temporary ban on most foreign aid, orders agencies to carry out temporary freeze on up to $3 trillion in domestic grants and other government pending, moves to dismantle US Agency for International Development, fires   Democratic member of National Labor Review Board paralyzing the Board, orders US withdrawal from World Health Organization, fires 17 inspectors general watchdog officials who  hunt for waste, fraud, abuse and illegality in government agencies, declares that Constitution’s 14th Amendment no longer grants citizenship to babies born on US soil  to undocumented parents or other visitors,urges 2 million federal employees to resign in order to replace as few of them as possible with loyalists, bars transgender people from serving in the military, denies federal funding to  hospitals that offer gender-transition care to people under the age of 19, prevents transgender people from having their identities reflected on their US passports, halts all work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, calls for resettling white “Afrikaner refugees” into the US from South Africa, mandates US government’s use of plastic straws, directs attorney general to review policies restricting firearms, establishes White House Faith Office, appoints Attorney General Pam Bondi to lead task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” in the federal government, imposes sanction on the International Criminal Court, orders funding withheld from public  schools, directs Pentagon to end diversity programs, restores federal death penalty, orders withdrawal from world’s main climate pact, suspends refugee resettlement program, lays foundation for US to deport international college students who participate in protests against Israel, installs himself as Chairman of the Kennedy Center
T h i s i s G r e a t ?

Ken Aptekar marked himself SAFE in America, 2025

(Names of recently fired government officials, illegally detained and deported individuals, e.g. Mahmoud Khalil)
Text: Ken Aptekar marked himself SAFE in America.
For how long?

Ma Petite Lueur d’Or, 2025, bluesky social media post (English translation below)

TEXT: J’achete des feuilles d’or a Paris chez Sennelier pendant que le demon aux Etats-Unis detruit tout ce qui m’est cher. J’ai 75 ans. Mais tout de meme, me demanderai-je dans quelques annees s’il n’aurait pas ete preferable de tout laisser tomber, et de me consacrer entierement a la Resistance active plutot que d’offrir, en ces temps si sombres, ma petite lueur d’or.

English translation: I buy gold leaf in Paris at Sennelier while the devil in the United States destroys everything I hold dear. I’m 75 years old. But still will I ask myself in a few years, would it not have been better to forget about all this, and devote myself entirely to the Resistance rather than offering, in such dark times, my little glimmer of gold.

TEXT: (From Stevie Wonder 1967 song, I Was Made To Love Her) I was made to love her, build my world all around her, hey hey hey

Image source: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, A distinguished member of the Humane Society, 1838, Tate Britain, London, UK