THUNDERCLAPS….AND MORE FROM JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Calligraphy and Drawing by Thomas Ingmire
Text selections from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
San Francisco, CA, 2014
Unique Book
9” X 12”, 28 pages Including cover,  Acrylic on Mylar with gold leaf illumination

THUNDERCLAPS in FINNEGANS WAKE are invented words that are 100 letters long. Joyce included ten; the final one was actually made up of 101 letters.  Three of the “Thunderclaps”  and other randomly selected words from the text have been chosen to interplay with abstract calligraphic marks that were made in response to various compositions by John Cage and his readings of Finnegans Wake. The two together, words and images, are intended to create a picture of sound. 

THUNDERCLAPS also references the Book of Kells. Aside from the Irish connection with Joyce and his reference to the book, Kells reminds us of the magic of the written word to stand merely as a visual image. Like the Book of Kells, THUNDERCLAPS invites the viewer to experience its visual splendor, and in reading, to the “hear” the music of the language. 

This book is now part of the Stanford University Literature Department Library.

My studio tack board, frankly, can only be described as an image of visual chaos. However it is filled with stuff I can't seem to part with. Some things have been hanging there for years. Studies and sketches, many the result of aimless play, I see as inspiration for new works. I look at them....and wait...for the muse to arrive. Posting a few of the images seems like a possible way of changing my view of them.  We shall see.

wool line loops     involutions......   from a poem by David Annwn

all this      and not     ordinary    not unordered......

day what a hard time I have     leaving you......    from "Songs," a Lorca poem

This is obviously something not meant to be read....A vivid imagination could probably make it say anything.

CAGE’S MUSES ON WORDS, ART,  AND MUSIC
Writings by John Cage  
Calligraphy and Drawing by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, CA, 2014
Unique Book
14.5  x 10 inches,   20 pages

This book is a visual expression of  selections from Cage's percussive works and various thoughts on Words, art, and music. The “image only” pages of the book were created spontaneously while listening to  compositions from the Third Construction and Credo in US. The calligraphic texts, from Silence: Lectures and Writing by John Cage,  and Sounds of the Inner Eye, ed. by Wulf Herzogenrath and Andreas Kreul, attempt  also to portray images of visual musical. The book is now part of the  collection at the Library of Congress.

Calligraphy and Drawings by Thomas Ingmire
Poetry by Robert Sheppard
Musical composition by Clifford Burke
Unique Book

Cafe Chronicles, February 2014
Calligraphy and Drawings by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, CA,  2013
Unique Book
5.5 x 7.5 inches,  36 pages

The February 2014 drawings were all done in Cafe Puccini. Many pages of the book had previously made calligraphic elements including letters from the alphabet, short texts, and abstract drawings. Also, towards the end of the month I added short poems and parts of poems by Kaye McDonough who I met one morning at the cafe.  "Paris in the twenties lasted forty years," is one of her poems. Kaye was a long time North Beach poet/resident who now lives and teaches on the East Coast. She was in town to do a reading at City Lights. I am thinking to continue with the idea of juxtaposing and drawing with a poem on a daily basis. It seems like an activity that  would  be good for one's mind.  It also enables me to explore curious relationships between words and image.

Time That Something Something
Text fragments from the poem by Jackson MacLow
Calligraphy, drawing, and Binding  by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, 2014
Unique book
9 x 12"  16 bound mylar  pages

The work of Jackson Mac Low served as inspiration for this book. The marks/drawing and lettering have been done in response to some of his various voice and instrumental compositions. The readable texts in the work are fragments from the Stein poems that he wrote between 1998 and 2003. In these poems he used his "deterministic" procedure for their development. My work in this book, made up of mylar pages, attempts to capture MacLow's experimentation and crossing of boundaries. The expressive calligraphic lettering and drawings gain a special richness because the show-through, and shimmering sheen of the mylar.

Asters of Risk, 
a collaboration between Thomas Ingmire,
Dorothy Sharrar, and David Annwn
San Francisco,  2013
Unique book
7.75 x 11.25 inches, 26 pages

The name of the book comes from the title of a poem written by David Annwn. The  project at the outset was a long distance collaboration between Dorothy Sharrar and me. Dorothy lives in Portland and my studio is in San Francisco. We have, for a number of years, had a shared interest in language and calligraphy and decided to express this in a joint book making project. I began the Asters book by creating the first two pages which I then mailed to Dorothy. She responded with a third page drawing and returned the pages. I followed with the next page drawing and we continued on the path or chain of alternative responses. Dorothy created initial pages for a second book which followed the same process.

After about a year our mutual back and forth collaboration ended and we each keep one of the books. I looked at my book from time to time, wrestling with the feeling that the work was somehow incomplete. It occurred to me one day to contact David Annwn, a poet with whom I have often worked, to see if he would be willing to use the images as inspiration for a poem. He responded by writing the poem Asters of Risk. With his response he wrote, "As I looked at and lived with Dorothy's and your work the idea of flashes of creativity 'coming through from other levels began to form. My poem takes up with the idea of discontinuities or gaps. Asters are both stars and flowers." 

After receiving David's poem (which David had written in his own hand) I worked back into the original book and introduced drawing into David's poetry pages.

Open Secrets: Ode to Jackson Mac Low
A visual/verbal Book by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, 2013 
Unique book
16 x 13 inches, 20 pages

Jackson Mac Low, (1922-2004) was an American Poet known particularly for his experimental approaches to poetry, musical compositions, and performance art.  Inspired in part by John Cage, Mac Low employed systematic chance operations and other similar non-intentional methods in his work. This book is a visual response to the audio performance work titled Open Secrets, by Jackson Mac Low and Anne Tardos. There are ten selections. Most of the works are multi-track voice compositions, while others are instrumental pieces. Specific words are sometimes discernible, but most of the time the voices are used as instruments of sound.

The pages of this book are visual mark making responses the Open Secrets pieces. The instrumental works are depicted with abstract marks, while the voice compositions have been created with layers of hand written and stencil made words. The book itself is an expression of sound. Some of the pages crackle when the pages are turned, others move in silence. 

Out of The Air 
Poetry by David Annwn 
Calligraphy by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, 2012 
Unique book
11.5 x 15.75 inches, 36 pages
This book records an experimental research with the British poet David Annwn. “Reactive, correlative or reciprocal successive ekphrasis” is the term that he proposes as a description of the work. It is a process by which a writer creates one text in relation to an image, the visual artist then creates a new image in relation to that text, and the writer then makes another text in relation to the second image, and so on, in a chain or path of responses. 

The sequence in this book was initiated by a non-verbal calligraphic image (page 2 in the book) by Ingmire. Annwn made a spontaneous poetic response that has been written by Ingmire on the facing page 1. The back and forth process yielded seven poems by Annwn that are coupled with Ingmire’s calligraphic responses. The book also includes a number of alternative images and sketches. Additional information about collaborations between Ingmire and Annwn can be found at :
http://lyndondavies.co.uk/w/1768/david-annwn-flying-through-poetry-collaborations-with/

At the completion of the project, John Cowey, a musician/composer friend of David's was inspired to create this composition.

Out of the Air is available at Vamp and Tramp Booksellers

Diva Fall Jive: Mr. Verb Visits the Tayu
Poetry by Christine Kennedy
Calligraphy by Thomas Ingmire 
Book structure by Kyoko Matsunaga
San Francisco, 2012 
Unique book
4.125 x 10.25 inches, 50 pages

This project was originally a collaboration with Christine Kennedy, but ultimately evolved to include book artist, Kyoko Matsunaga, and composer/musician, Hide Takemoto.  Christine created her poem as a response to an abstract calligraphic image that I had made while listening to music.  She used a delightfully unique  path to get to her poem. Working with the software program Abby Fine Reader, she scanned my "music" sheet  in all four directions with the command to read it in English. This produced several pages of typographic symbols and fragments of words. Those sheets were run through Microsoft Word spell check and resulted in a collection of words, which then became the basis for her poem.

The poem, with its Japanese associations, led to my invitations  to the other two artists. Kyoko created the fan-like structure which she has given the name "water-wheel binding.  It can take many forms and  is as much a sculpture as it is a book.  Images of the book and the poem were then sent to Hide Takemoto, who lives in London. He responded with a composition  titled "Honey Rain." 

The book is currently available from Vamp and Tramp Booksellers.