Scriptorium: Devout Exercises of the Heart

Scriptorium consists of 500 small drawings and paintings executed directly on pages of old books and manuscript. They will be exhibited pinned to the wall with simple dressmaker's pins. The arrangement is variable as to dimensions and number of images.  The pages have been removed from discarded and damaged books from America, England, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Russia, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Tibet and Japan. They date from ca. 1500-1920.
Each page supports a drawing or painting of a flower, leaf, or plant drawn from life.  Scriptorium has been executed over the year of 2009 both in my studio and during travels to Rochester, Colorado, Long Island, and Panama. Consequently, there is a wide range of seasonal flowers. They have been drawn on the page using many different techniques and conventions of depiction--from faintest outlines that nearly disappear in the blocks of text, to strongly rendered forms that nearly obliterate the text underneath them. The ink lines or the areas of color react with the absorbency of the paper and the density of the text in an infinitely varying manner.
I am intrigued by the resultant layers of visual connection from one finished page to the next, and also by the fact that this information is, for the most part, dispensable knowledge: an old logarithm table, the text of a Noh play, an old handwritten property deed. But then, some of them are very potent texts: Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, and religious treatises. All of these pages miraculously survived in one way or another and all of them came into my possession either by gift or purchase of distressed books.
A scriptorium is the room in a medieval monastery where old books were copied by hand. Devout Exercises of the Heart is the title of one of the books whose pages I have used, and is also a metaphor for my sustained activity on this project.
I would like to think that these superimposed flowers in Scriptorium bring the pages back to life, make us wonder who owned and read these books, and through their foxing, notations and even burned areas, allow us to ponder their varied histories.

Robert Kushner, New York

A recent review from Denmark's Weekendavisen reads:
"In Kushner's work hundreds of years of testimony and recognition of flowers grow across the typography, the letters and the Babylonian confusion of world languages. It is well thought out, well seen, and beautifully done, yes even moving, to witness how language literally is flowering in Kushner's scriptorium. Language is being touched, we are being touched."

Carpets

For some years, I actively collected flat weave oriental carpets, known as kilims. I loved the softened but strong colors, the way the designs interlaced and the fact that there was really no positive or negative to the flattened shapes. After my trip to Iran and Afghanistan in 1974, where I bought a lot of carpets and saddlebags in the bazaars, and sent them home, I realized that nearly all of them had holes or frayed edges which I needed to repair. I apprenticed to a young restorer and then worked free lance for about five years for Artweave Textile Gallery.

Robert Kushner, untitled, edition of 15, signed by the artist, Tibetan wool, silk, 60x53 inches

When I was asked by Bravin Lee Gallery to submit a design for a pile carpet to be woven in Nepal, I was pleased, and knew a little about what I would be asking the weavers to do.

This design: One Red Geranium features forms derived from Central Asian Suzani, or embroideries. In the middle of this abstracted swirl of vegetal forms, I placed one enlarged red bloom of my trusty geranium (who blooms nearly all year at my windowsill just in case I might need a model.) I liked the contrast of the different sets of curving forms, the combination of three different fibres and the technicolor redness of the geranium against the black/white/gray of the field.

Bravin Lee featured Robert Kushner's  carpet at Art Miami in December 2011.