In beauty

Artist’s book setting a poem translated from the Navajo by J Rothenberg, author unnamed, made from 10 sheets of handmade paper (each sheet 75cm x 15cm), forming a double-sided concertina book with nine double-pages on front side, eight on the second side, plus front and back covers; each double page is 30cm wide x 15 cm high, and the overall length of the book is 300cm; book closed in slipcase 18cm x 18cm x 1.5cm; with watercolour, acrylics, acid-free adhesive. Signed numbered and dated: this copy is 1 in an edition of 3.

In beauty may I walk. So begins this poem translated from the Navajo in 1971 by Jerome Rothenberg, (the original poet un-named). I was commissioned to make an artist’s book for the ninety-fourth birthday of a great historian of Arapaho descent, who is just re-learning to walk after a hip replacement; I was delighted to find a First Nation poem so rich in relevance. I loved the idea that it’s impossible to tell when (or even if ) this poem was written; it could be 500 years ago or yesterday, and this timelessness is not its only engaging quality. I like how it addresses the idea of ageing (All my days on a path of beauty lively may I live), and living in time as both deeply personal (a matter for individual determination) and yet universal (something we all share and understand), and the feeling that the poet is un-named yet familiar, someone we know and love.

I also love the poem’s incantatory quality, suggesting its source in an oral tradition, the repetitive affirmations cumulatively building to the serenely enlightened and assured ending. This chant-like structure allows the text to be set in a continuous path for the words to walk along, a golden line (On the trail marked with pollen may I walk) running along both sides of the book across each page, with the variations in stress and rhythm picked up in each page’s design.

I set one line to each page in a sequence that follows the pattern of the year (Through the returning seasons may I walk), each season to a page also.

By this reckoning, the book cycles through the seasons of four years, beginning in winter, following the path through spring, summer and autumn, and back to winter again, to end on a winter’s night of stars and snow that extends to the front cover of the book, and so back to the beginning again.

Each seasonal page is suggested by the words of the line. I always look for ways to design a page as a whole, rather than make an illustration with space to accommodate text; my aim is that the words and image are fully integrated, are in fact the same thing. And with a richly visual poem like this, there’s so much imagery to draw on. I especially enjoyed drawing the grasshoppers (With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk), finding that a coloured pencil gave an appropriately dry, light, and transitory quality to the little grasshoppers sitting on the pencilled grassy strokes of the letters, about to jump off at any moment.

I used pond water to mix the paint for the moorhen paddling among the dewberries (With dew about my feet may I walk), to bring in the dewy quality of pond-weed and wet grass.

And for the snow scene (With beauty all around me may I walk) I mixed the white paint with snow-melt from last winter, to draw in the material presence of the snow to the letters.

All my life may I walk in beauty. In beauty.

The next book is about a different kind of walking.