Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter
San Francisco: Thomas Ingmire, n.d. This is a striking unique work by calligrapher Thomas Ingmire that tells Francesca's story from Dante's fifth Canto of his Inferno. Her story is written on strips of calfskin parchment cut for left-over (abandoned) scraps of vellum. The pieces of background text are in type, also from Canto V, and are remnants from another project done in the early 1990s. The container for the text is paper pulp with wooden sticks. The pulp covers have swaths of black sumi ink and gold leaf, with paper collage pieces of text in the background. Ingmire writes of this work: "The idea for this 'book' originates with the book-like covers which were the result of a paper making experiment that was deemed a failure. The object was passed along to me as packing material with a paper order that I received from Cave Paper Handmade Papermakers. I always connected the word 'abandoned' with the object. The structure also looked a bit like a moth. As a symbol one is remined of Palatino's motto 'And though I know it well, I go towards what burns me up' with an image of a moth flying into a candle flame."
Thomas Ingmire wrote in a brief biography that he has "been hanging out in the San Francisco North Beach Cafes since 1972...which coincides with his interests in calligraphy, drawing, painting, and bookmaking. Since 2002 he has concentrated on the making of artist's books. He has embarked on a number of collaborative projects, including a series of books with Manuel Neri; work as an illuminator on the famous St. John's Bible; and the creation of original books in collaboration with poets from the UK, Singapore, the Republic of the Philippines, and the United States. In a review by Bruce Nixon for a 2013 exhibition held at Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts on Ingmire's calligraphy in collaboration with poets and artists, he writes: "back in the 1980s, a period when Thomas Ingmire was already beginning to establish himself as a calligrapher of note, much of his work drew upon poetry by Blake, Rimbaud, Eliot, Stevens, and Levertov - exactly the kind of text we typically associate with the strategies of modern calligraphy...with the traditional, rule-bound duties of elegant lettering and decoration. To look at that work now, after more than two decades we can see that Ingmire was never interested only in the beautifully composed page, or in the well trodden avenues of visualization and interpretation that preoccupy calligraphy at its most straightforward. Even then, he was fascinated by the pictorial possibilities of language, the word{s) as image, the immersion of language in an exhilarating atmosphere of visual invention....The entire basis of his [current ] enterprise can be enclosed, perhaps, in the idea that (our) written language...related to drawing through line, can still partake freely in the protean, originative energies of drawing, while its bases in orthography and the alphabet insure as well that the calligrapher is free to look every which way across an endlessly negotiable territory between text, functionality, and art."
Book is 11 x 28 inches when open. In fine condition. Accompanied by a sheet with the description of the structure and its inspiration. ARTB/090924. Fine.
Item #37449
Price: $3,200.00