Islander Suzanne Moore has painted and hand-lettered entire books that now rest in collections of libraries as prestigious as the Library of Congress.
Now, she’s taken her rarefied work to a new level, working on what is considered the most extensive scribal commission in the Western world since the end of the Middle Ages.
She’s one of five artists and six scribes helping to create the first handwritten Bible in 500 years, a project spanning more than a decade and with a budget of $4 million.
Moore, who moved to Vashon three years ago, displayed a completed painting on its large vellum page, with accompanying calligraphed text, in her basement art studio last week.
She talked about the weighty implications of recreating a book that has changed lives, touched off wars, stirred controversy and moved countless souls.
“The concept of the Bible, creating something new, a 21st-century Bible, is the basis of all of this — to be cross-cultural, ecumenical in a way that would include other spiritual traditions and would include women in a more balanced way than other Bibles have before,” Moore said. “I can’t think of another project that is likely to be so visible to people, that is interpreting something that’s been so significant, for so long, in a new way. And that’s what intrigued me about the project.”
Creating paintings, called illuminations, on each of the Bible’s two-foot by three-foot pages, is an arduous and exacting process.
A full-time book artist, Moore uses high-quality tube paints, brushes of different sizes, pens, rubber stamps, stencils and even eggs to make illuminations to accompany the text of the St. John’s Bible, a project commissioned by St. John’s University in Minnesota, which is run by Benedictine monks.
Two original pages from the Bible, with illuminations by Moore, will be displayed at the Tacoma Art Museum this summer. She will be on hand to discuss the artistic process.
“The job of the illuminator historically has always been to evoke something in the reader, and before people were literate, it was the way for the non-literate person to access the message through imagery,” she said. “The concept of illumination is light clarifying something, and most often it is something that clarifies the text or heightens the meaning of the text.”
Gilding, or gold leaf, is an integral part of many illuminations, because of its power to bring light to a painting, Moore said. She jokes that when she is illuminating, she’s a “gilding slave.”
She said illuminations can range from full-page paintings without words, to artistic and rich paintings featuring Bible verses; from medallions in the margins of pages of text to wildlife flora and fauna.
Her most recent illumination is about “the core concept of the book,” she said. She took great care that her paintings be cross-cultural.
“I took passages from sacred books of every culture I could find — Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew — and I made up one codex page,” Moore said. “Every line is a different language and every one is from a different sacred page.”
The illumination took her 60 to 80 hours, she said.
Moore adds illuminations to pages after scribes calligraph them, leaving a portion of a page for Moore’s artistry. The scribes use 100-year-old sticks of carbon-based ink, so old likely because their quality becomes better with age, Moore said.
She said vellum is “magic stuff,” and different to work with than other media. It can be made of the skin of different animals, but for this project is the skin of cattle, because of the scale of the sheets.
The skins are stretched very thin, then scraped and “scrunched,” a type of sanding that makes their surface perfect for writing and painting, Moore said.
“It has to be the finest peach fuzz,” she said. “Vellum has such an interesting quality because it is part of a living being and so the tactile quality is unlike any paper you could make.”
Vellum also has amazing longevity, lasting for hundreds of years.
“Lots of early manuscripts were completely erased, all the words and images were scraped off them and they were reused,” Moore said. “The beauty of vellum is you can scrape off an error.”
But in the case of a much larger error, such as omitting several lines of text, scribes have to get more creative.
In one instance, a scribe missed four lines on a page, but had no intention of scraping off half the page and redoing it, so he put the lines at the end of the page. He then drew a little man with a hook and a line, “pulling” the lines up to their correct place in the text.
“There’s a historical basis for that,” Moore said.
Prior to moving to Vashon in 2005, Moore had been living in Cleveland, working as the art director for the lettering design group at American Greetings.
“I think of a card as a really tiny accessible book,” she said. “It usually has words, imagery, a message to convey, and one person hands it to another or sends it to another and it is an accessible object.”
Moore’s history with printmaking, bookmaking and calligraphy dates back decades, since she graduated from college. She has known the artistic director of the St. John’s Bible project, Donald Jackson, for 30 years.
She attended a calligraphy conference in Minneapolis 30 years ago, where Jackson was the keynote speaker, and he had 400 people in one room, making an illuminated “S” with gold leaf, Moore said.
Her husband Don Glaister, also a book artist, said he supports her work on the St. John’s project.
“I think it’s lovely; I think it’s wonderful,” he said. “It’s an important project they’re working on.”
Moore’s first illumination assignment for the St. John’s Bible was to introduce the Last Judgment. She wasn’t thrilled to hear this, but took to the assignment well. The artistic directors of the project directed her to emphasize the “brightness of possibility” rather than the “gnashing of teeth,” and her finished painting truly glitters with countless mosaic squares in many shades of gold.
The painting was inspired by the Basilica de San Marco in Venice, Italy — a glittering, golden church built in the Byzantine style. Moore said she was inspired by the “dome of heaven.”
The St. John’s Bible is being bound in seven separate volumes, because it would be too heavy and nearly impossible to bind the two-foot tall book in one piece.
“The technical demands of reproducing something like this are really high,” Moore said. “They need to find a bindery that’s capable of binding two by three books. We’re going to have to invent whatever we do. Nobody is set up and equipped to bind something of this scale.”
Moore has completed 11 illuminations thus far. The six scribes completed illuminations in 2006, eight years after they began — “they’re really fast,” Moore said. The illuminators have not yet completed their paintings but will within a few years.
“Every book I’ve ever made has changed my viewpoint and changed my understanding of something in the world,” Moore said. “The scale of this book is just so huge that it’s been illuminating on many levels.”
BOX:
Two illuminated pages by illuminator and book artist Suzanne Moore will be on display as part of Tacoma Art Museum’s exhibit “Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible” July 12 — September 7.
Moore will also lead classes for Tacoma Art Museum’s summer camp for kids, “What’s the Word.” The week-long camp for 9- 12-year-olds will introduce kids to calligraphy, bookmaking and storytelling. It is held July 14-18 and costs $225.
