Ninth Wave Designs

NWD at CafePress: Beta

I have finally gotten around to opening up a Ninth Wave Designs merchandise store at CafePress.com.  So many bloggers have set up CafePress stores as a way to offset the costs of blogging that I thought this would be a great way to pay the Typepad bills without adding Google advertising to the blog.  I have a large backlog of original Celtic artwork available to adorn the variety of products offered by CafePress, so I have started listing items for sale with an eye toward the upcoming St. Patrick's Day holiday.   I have begun with a few different images of St. Patrick himself, like the journal shown here, as a way to tie in with the festivities.  I am happy to announce that the store is in what I would call the Beta stage: Fully operational, but with a number of minor tweaks and adjustments still to be made.  Additionally, I will be adding loads more products to the store as the days progress towards March 17th, featuring a number of additional artwork images.  Check back daily to see what is new!

I thought I would give you a little background information on the artwork featured in the NWD CP store.  The images featured on the journals, mugs, tee-shirts and other products are all original Celtic designs created by yours truly, and were done primarily between 2000 and 2005.  I created this artwork all by hand, without using the computer for any part of the design.  Call me a Luddite, but my creative inspiration for this artwork comes from the illuminated manuscripts of early medieval Ireland, so although my technique does not replicate that historic method (no goats were skinned in the process of making my art) I still experience a connection to that time in working entirely by hand.

The images are first drawn out in pencil on graph paper and then transferred to artist quality illustration board.  I ink the outlines of the artwork and then paint the design using liquid acrylic inks.  My method of mixing colors for these somewhat complicated designs involves using only three primary colors of ink, intermixing them to get all the colors in the image.  This helps build a strong relationship between all the colors used in the image, and eliminates much of the chances of having colors clash within the design.  Some color areas of the paintings are built up with as many as 8 or more layers of colors to create the right quality for the image.  The process of creating this artwork is very labor intensive, with even a small painting (5" x 7") taking me several weeks from start to finish.

Have a browse through the first items now available, and if you see something you would like to order you will also be able to enjoy helping to support the NWD blog - future posts as well as the archive of all the Moleskine related information created since July 2005.  Bookmark the store and check back again soon for new items including a number of Celtic tee-shirt designs and images created from my Alchemy Notebook project.  If there is a specific type of product you would like to see that is not listed yet just let me know and I will add it to the offering.   Enjoy!

M Is For Medieval: Or How The Irish Invented The Moleskine

Following is the post I wrote that first appeared on March 17th, 2005 on the  Moleskinerie weblog.  This post was the birth of the blogging bug for me, although it wasn't until many months later that I started my own blog here.  I am posting this in time for St. Patrick's Day to celebrate a bit of Irish in the Italian recreation of a French original: The Moleskine.

A great deal of my creative inspiration originates with the manuscripts of early medieval Ireland. Perhaps the best known example is the Book of Kells, which reigns supreme among the elaborately illuminated manuscripts from that era. These decorated books are typified by mind-boggling details, swirling spirals, elaborately complex knotwork patterns, and undecipherable letterforms. These images burst off the vellum pages and stand apart from other illuminated manuscripts of that time period as a unique creative expression reflecting many of the cultural complexities of the early history of Ireland.

 

Strangely though, my imagination has been completely captivated by a comparatively small, unadorned assemblage of odd sheets of vellum called The St. Paul Irish Codex (or more formally: MS: Unterdrauberg, Carinthia, Kloster St. Paul 25.2.31). This manuscript was the personal notebook of an Irish scribe working in the early ninth century, most likely in the scriptorium at Reichenau, an island monastery on Lake Constance located between Germany and Switzerland. It contains no color other than the deep brown of the ink, and no illumination of any kind, yet it seems to me to reveal more about at least this one personality behind the long labor of creating illuminated manuscripts.

 

This un-named monk assembled what discarded pieces of vellum he could gather together and used his notebook to jot down interesting text he came across in his daily work (incidentally, the size of this notebook is very close to a large size Moleskine). Written in a very tight script you will find bits of grammar, animal lore, an incantation, and an endearing poem in Old Irish about a monk and his cat named Pangur Bán, all on the same page. Throughout the other pages of the notebook are excerpts written in Greek, an astrological table, and notes on logic, metaphysics and etymology, among other topics.

How, you wonder, does this relate to the modern day Moleskine? Well in its own way, the St. Paul Irish Codex is a very well preserved example of the centuries-old need to organize one’s thoughts on the written page. In the very same way that most of us today cobble together threads of ideas, quotations, and excerpts from our favorite writers between the pages of our Moleskines, this ninth century scribe created a small portrait of himself in the handwritten notebook he left behind. His interests, reflected in small fragments of an impressively wide range of subjects, reveal much when taken together as a whole. None of what he collected was written in the first person – all the words originally belonged to someone else – but collectively they became his own.

Much has been made of the Irish contribution to Western society, so by comparison, giving an Irish monk credit for inventing the Moleskine does not seem that excessive. I do know that the process I go through filling my own notebooks can similarly be found in this otherwise ordinary looking manuscript created just over 12 centuries ago. How much of ourselves can be perceived between the lines of our own notebooks? When I read between the lines of the St. Paul Irish Codex I am inspired by the presence of a living man long turned to dust who continues to speak through his handwritten pages.

Samhain: Time Outside of Time

Many of the Halloween traditions celebrated in the U.S. originate from old Celtic traditions, so Irish immigrants must have brought many of the common symbolic elements with them to this country.  One of the big ones, carving Jack-O-Lanterns, originated with the tradition in Ireland of making an effigy of a head from a turnip.  There are not so many turnip carvers around nowadays, especially since pumpkins are far better suited for the job.  The general idea is the same though, a scary face with a candle inside, and it harkens back to the ancient Celtic fascination with severed heads, the details of which I will skip here.

The one ancient Celtic tradition that is most commonly celebrated today is dressing up as otherworld creatures: ghosts, goblins and other frightening monsters. This tradition originates with the ancient festival of Samhain and how that celebration reflected the Celtic concept of time and the calendar.  Samhain was one of the four major celebrations during the Celtic year, and is the point in the annual cycle where one year ends and another begins - sort of an ancient version of our New Year's Eve.  The Celt's concept of the daily cycle provided that the old year ended at sundown on the last day in October (as it corresponds to our calendar), the New Year began at sunrise on November first.  This resulted in a gap in time between sunset and sunrise which belonged to neither the old nor the new year - a time outside of time.  This physical break in time was seen as a doorway through which beings from the otherworld could leak into the real world - similar to the concept of the Hell Mouth in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Fires were lit to keep malevolent spirits at bay, and dressing as one of them would disguise your mortal aspect, preventing the terrifying possibility of being dragged into the otherworld by the evil spirits.

I find this idea very compelling, that the calendar year could have a gap in it between ending and beginning again. Our contemporary year moves with very little interruption, and even the general idea of holidays has eroded with businesses being open through all the holidays in the year:  24-7-365. That there exists this concept of a time outside of the regular cycle of time, that the year has to stop for a while before it can begin anew, is something we could do well to embrace, even in small ways.  Imagine a time outside of time; something magical that made the phone stop ringing, the internet idle, and had people staying home for some quiet contemplation; just as a reminder of the end of one important cycle, the beginning of the next. It is something almost impossible to think of today - a collectively ritualized secular experience of time - but it is an interesting concept nonetheless. Heck, even the ancient Celts had to have the frightening aspect of otherworld demons to reinforce the Samhain ritual to make them stop and pay attention.  Perhaps then what we need is a renewed belief in otherworld monsters to get us to slow down a bit, for one evening at least. 

Choose your costumes accordingly and have a great time out of time on Halloween!