Page 62 part 4

All the workings disappear and what remains is just the refined and isolated text with it’s joining rivers working rhythmically down the page, ready for the next stage of the process.

Page 62 part 3

Continuing from our opening frames here we have the next stage in the creation of page 62. We left the page (see below) at the point where Tom Phillips had started to identify the pockets of text across the page through which he would build his narrative, here he continues to examine the options, centre right of the page a number of possibilities are explored closely and loosely, with heavy markings and cancellations, at this stage appearing chaotic but through which the flow will open up. This is the most unresolved appearance of the page, the one in which multiple options are ventured (click on the image to enlarge). Meanwhile on the brown gumstrip surrounding the page some personal aides memoire appear, email addresses and reminders to invite friends to the ROH preview of a new opera of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (that Tom Phillips has designed and written the libretto to). The gumstrip won't remain in the finished version so these are just doodles in the margin and, intriguingly give us a time capsule of the peripheral concerns of the maker whilst the work continues centre stage.

The Library at Elsinore

While we await the next update of page 62, here is a small fragment of A Humument made in 2006, it appeared on the invitation to a talk given by Tom Phillips at a dinner of the Double Crown Club the subject being The Library at Elsinore. This was during the time that The Library at Elsinore was being fabricated in the studio, and here it makes a cameo appearance in A Humument.
Virtually all the work on A Humument has been done in the evenings so that Phillips might not, had the thing become a folly, regret the waste of days. In his introduction to the book he explains the processes.
"When I started work on the book late in 1966, I merely scored unwanted words with pen and ink; it was not long though before the possibility became apparent of making a better unity of word and image, intertwined as in a mediaeval miniature. This more comprehensive approach called for a widening of the techniques to be used and of the range of visual imagery, Thus painting (in watercolour or gouache) became the basic technique with some pages still executed in pen and ink only, some involving typing and some using collaged fragments from other parts of the book.
Much of the pictorial matter in the book follows the text in mood and reference: much of it also is entirely non-referential, merely providing a framework for the verbal statement and responding to the disposition of the text on the page. In every case the text was the first thing decided upon: some texts have taken years to reach a definitive state, usually because such a rich set of alternatives was present on a single page and only rarely because the page seemed quite intractable. The only means used to link words and phrases are the ‘rivers’ in the type of the original: these, if occasionally tortuous, run generously enough and allow the extracted writing to have some flow so that it does not become (except where this is desirable) a series of staccato bursts of words."