Artist's Prints by Denis Brown

VITILUM INMACULATUM
Artist's edition print, Denis Brown, 2003. Scroll down for details. Click here to order.

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Vitulum Inmaculatum

Denis Brown, 2003. 30 x 42 cm

Image size: 38 x 27 cm, 10.5" x 14.5". Paper size: 33 x 48 cm, 19" x 13". Edition limited to just 150 prints, each signed and numbered by the artist.

The appearance is of a Celtic manuscript in insular minuscule, but closer inspection reveals a personal style throughout. The minuscule script is actually a hybrid of insular and italic characteristics written with vigorous flicked strokes. Some uniquely Irish letter-forms and abbreviations are incorporated, but nonetheless, the text should be legible to those familiar with Latin.

The interlinear English text is from Catherine Byron's book, The Getting of Vellum. The extract quoted here between the lines of latin minuscule, struck me so much that I have attempted several renditions of it. Catherine witnessed the skinning of a ‘slunk’ (naturally stillborn) calf using a "winch and a steel hawser". Slunks yield the finest vellums, and the skins used in this work were made by Joe Katz of Vellum & Parchment Works in Kildare, Ireland.

Catherine’s remarkable account of the process of transfigurement of dead calf into fine vellum is in itself an act of transfiguration- turning a queasy description of a dead animal into something beautiful:

Who would have thought it needed a winch and a steel hawser to slowly, steadily, undress a calf? Sure I can skin a rabbit with my bare hands, take its soft vest of fur up and over its head - rather too like undressing a baby. But skinning a calf, a three days dead calf, is another thing altogether. It's like watching a birth, not a flaying, seeing the calf being born a second time, this headfirst slow emergence from its skin as if from the birth canal. So dainty and delicate in its glassy, gleaming pinks and whites, its untried muscles and tendons, its organs - lungs, gut, heart - never used ex utero. Uterine vellum. Slunk.
Catherine Byron, from The Getting of Vellum.

From "The Getting of Vellum" by Catherine Byron
www.salmonpoetry.com/vellum.html

ABOUT THE ARCHIVAL MEDIA

Printed from an Epson 2100 using Epson’s 7-colour UltraChrome ink system at 2880 x 1440 dpi on Epson acid free watercolour paper, a combination to ensure long lasting quality. Wilhelm Imaging Research (www.wilhelm-research.com), suggest prints using this combination of ink and media will last for over 90 years without appreciable fading , based on indoor display framed under glass. Dark Storage Stability Rating at 73°F/50%RH is indicated to last over 200 years. The detail is super fine at this resolution, being almost 10 times finer than normal commercial printing, so that even under a magnifying glass the prints hold up to very close scrutiny.

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