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Black Book.

Dreams not only come from the past but also the future. Often a dream only makes sense much later, often years later. In one such dream I dreamt that I was supporting a man with Parkinson's disease. I was making his bed and found a black book under his mattress, hidden from his wife. I wondered what indiscretions the book contained. I did not open it but put it back where I found it.

Perhaps the dream was telling me that I too would create a black book full of indiscretions, my copy book. The contemporary notion of art is one of personal authorship, originality and imagination. My artistic practice is none of those things. It is an anachronism, the survival or return of a much older way of creating art.

For a long time, I kept this aspect of my artistic practice a secret. Having gone through my old artworks I am now more interested in this aspect of my practice. The black book can now come out from under the mattress. The creation of a copy book is a way of embracing this aspect of my artistic process. I now want to know if my “black book” aids my artistic practice and leads to the creation of new artworks,

I wonder if the anachronistic nature of copy books is why very few copy, model or pattern books still survive. I have only found images of a few surviving examples on the web like the one below.

Viridarium novum, variis animalculis floribus, ac herbis adornatum... - Histoire naturelle - Collections patrimoniales numérisées des bibliothèques de l'Université de Strasbourg

There is also only one piece of writing that deals with copy books, ‘From the Model-Book to the Sketch-Book,’

From the modelbook to the sketchbook

The other option being that they simply fell apart from repeated use. Below are the first few pages of my copy book containing images I can use in other artworks. 







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