About the Material

Unless otherwise noted, each page is represented by an acrylic painting on a 9"x12" piece of canvas paper. For the most part, these are pretty inexpensive paints, of the type you can buy at Michael's or Ben Franklin's. I do like this slow-drying brand that I recently tried, so I'm slowly switching over to that as older tubes run out. I tape the 9"x12" pieces of canvas paper down and then paint, so each will have a slightly different sized painted area. In addition, my scanner will not handle a full 9"x12", so many of the images will be cropped.

The Abbot of Unreason watermark in each image is not painted on the surface. I add that after taking a picture or scan of the artwork.

About this Project

OK, so the first thing you need to know is this: I don't know what I'm doing. I am not an artist. I am a mechanical engineer by training and a developer/coach by vocation. Yes, yes, for someone who is not an artist, I start a lot of artsy projects. I write. I scatter wee toaty clay people all over the place. But you shouldn't, not even for a moment, take this to mean that I have the slightest clue what I'm doing.

But I do have a plan. No, wait, that's not right. What I have is a vision. It might even be more accurate to say that I have an inspiration: Matt Kish's One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick. I'm a little slow. I started following his production back in July, and I almost immediately decided I wanted to do something similar. But it took me until October to decide which novel, and then what with travel and holidays, it seemed appropriate to push the launch date to the first of the year. And so join us on New Year's Day, 2011, to see if I'll really follow through with this project.

In addition to an inspiration, I have a theory. No, that's not right, either. What I have is a hypothesis. Perhaps by the end of this experiment, I'll have a theory, but for now it's only a hypothesis: If I spend the time with every page of a novel, absorbing it enough to make a bit of art, then the text will imprint itself on my brain like nothing before. I tend to read through books so quickly that a month can pass after I read one and I can't remember what happened in it. After a year with every page of Frankenstein I should have trouble forgetting it. I've already started re-reading the novel and I'm surprised by all this emo stuff at the beginning.

Maybe I should have started by telling you which book? It's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a book that has been well-abused by the art world, at least as far as the film industry is a part of the art world. Oh, and there was that opera -- the only opera I've ever seen. No, wait, that was about Mary Shelley herself. At any rate, it's a book that can surely not be harmed by my treatment; not if it has survived Hollywood.

And I'm really hoping that my treatment will improve over time. My second hypothesis is that creating something for every page of Frankenstein will produce enough art that I'll be able to see some improvement between the first bit and the last bit. Surely I can't make 203 paintings without a wee bit of improvement? Of course, they might not all be paintings. I'm not making any promises other than the creation of one bit of art for every page. In fact, I can't say how much the art will be traceable by outsiders to the text itself. I'll note the sentence that keyed my response, but the response itself may just be, hopefully, almost a visual-arts version of stream of consciousness writing.

I have chosen a book on a much smaller scale than Moby-Dick. I'll be using the Penguin Classics paperback edition. It has 203 pages. Well, it has more than that, but I'm going to be starting on Page 63, with the first letter from Robert Walton to his sister. I won't be spending my time with the introductions and preface.

So, there you have it: the first thing you need to know. What's the next thing you need to know? I'm not sure. Feel free to ask in the comments. Also, go ahead and stick this in your RSS reader or click on that follow button over on the right. Then you'll be sure to start receiving whatever it is that pops out starting on the first of January. Play along and see if I really can improve or not.