The Story of a Silver Wheel in the Persian Style

I was sent an assignment for an event I've never been to, in a region I've not visited before and it necessitated that I ship my artwork to the Crown. All harrowing thoughts, seriously.

So I reached out to the contact listed on the assignment and got more information about one Lady Brit. An more information than I expected! So I started my research on a Safavid Persian scroll. This was useful as it greatly narrowed down the source material. In the British Library I found my mark - a Persian manuscript of the Tales of Sindbad, done in an Indian style.

My Exemplars: IO Islamic 3214 f.1r and f.46v

f.46v

f.1r

The hand is Nasta'liq - it is defined by short ascenders, long descenders, and a good deal of room between the beginning and end of a letter. I'm not sure that I was faithful to the hand in my exemplar, but it's a better faux Arabic than I've done before.

The text was very fun for me - I created text using one of the stories of Sindbad as a guide. The text tells the tale of the Court at Adventus, and Empress Caoilfhionn and Emperor Brennan assembling scholars and poets and having a discussion of what makes a person helpful. Many speak up and mention in turn the deeds that, it turns out, have all been performed by Brit. The Order speaks that they want her included and the Crown agrees, and so bestows the Silver Wheel.

The layout I chose is a combination of these two pages. Neither struck me as the right layout on their own, and I wanted something simple for this scroll, but striking. And so I landed at the layout of the finished piece:

A combination of two sources from the same book, adding diagonal text to balance the top and punctuating the piece with two diagonals giving more weight to the signature boxes for The Crown.

The materials are gouache and pergamenta, I did not use shell gold or gold leaf on this piece. In the original, the center of the medallion appears to be gold leaf, while the line work in both the medallion and the text page appear to be something closer to a mustard yellow. I decided that gold would stand better against the color of the perg, and would balance the metallic silver of the award itself, and so I used Holbein Rich Gold. I increased the proportion of the blue surround to give the medallion weight that wasn't just the gold in the center, and also to follow the wider center medallions sometimes seen in other Persian works.

The mockup for this layout was done in Photoshop. 

I'll confess - this is the first assignment I used the magic line tool on... and I love it. 


I've used a line tool to mark lines for my calligraphy before, but after Panteria I learned of the line tool for just making paint lines. I am extremely happy with how precise the lines are, and I see where my hand wavered and I released more paint than I wanted to - imperfections that I'm sure some can see but that I am ok with. 


The recipient: I was told that Brit prefers Persian, sometimes 
Landsknecht, sometimes Viking, and sometimes 13th century English. I took a chance that she prefered Persian and went that route. I'm glad I did. :) 

A Brooch...

I was awarded the Silver Brooch at East Kingdom 50 Year. I am grateful to their Majesties for including me in the Order of the Silver Brooch. I know I swore when I went up there. I know I was completely surprised - my dear Lord Guinemer did a wonderful job of keeping me in the dark the whole time.

I've been working on my arts lately, pushing myself to do better research and produce more correct documents. I know what I'm striving for now - deep authenticity in my work. A little winter bird asked me what I wanted out of my path. I almost choked when she asked me, partly because I knew at that time what milestone was coming soon on her path and partly because no one had actually asked me that before. I've thought long and hard about the question Mistress Christiana asked me that day and I have an answer now.

I want to produce works that are complete. What I mean is that I want to create something that when anyone views it gets a complete and total sense of the time period the work is from. I want to include the specific little details that make a piece period - glossing, marginalia, short hand, etc. I want a piece that I create to look as full and alive as the exemplars. I also want to create pieces that are original, that look as though they're another page of the book, not exactly *that* page of the book. Eventually, I want to help other people do that too. I want to be able to do a thing so completely that I can teach it. After all, what good is knowledge if you don't pass it on?

That's the goal of my path. There are many people I want to learn from to achieve this. I don't know if I'll ever wear the belt of one specific person, or a belt at all for that matter, and that's ok too. This doesn't worry me, or bother me. I want the knowledge and skill more than anything else.

So now comes the fun part of achieving my goal. It's all art, and that's the best part. Research is art. Painting and calligraphy is art. I feel like I took a good step with the Deed scroll. I also feel like the Deed scroll fell short in some really important areas. You'll have to read my documentation to get that info though, it's too long for a blog post.

(I feel like there's a Muppet's song playing in the background now... 😄)

So this is me, on my way. 😊