- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: Stone Bridge Press (31 Dec 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1880656671
- ISBN-13: 978-1880656679
- Product Dimensions: 22.8 x 17.8 x 1.4 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,788,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product details
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Taking inspiration from Asian pictographs and using a Japanese shodo brush, L. J. C. Shimoda explains how, using 66 ordinary English words as prompts for meditation, writing and drawing Glyphix. You'll learn how to examine your feelings and relationships to achieve personal and artistic growth. Creating Glyphix is fun, too, a great way for kids and logophiles alike to discover how words work on different levels of meaning.
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The first step in creating a glyphix is to represent a chosen word through a drawing. For example, the way the author describes the glyphix for the concept "glyphix" itself (the drawing that appears on the cover of the book above) is that it is the "profile of an eye, open wide with curiosity; the projection from the eye signifies true seeing/understanding." The author uses a _shodo_ brush and _sumi_ ink to produce elegant characters with an Asian feel, but the editor's introduction encourages readers to use tools on hand. The glyphix is somewhat akin to the symbolism used in American Sign Language and the Word Sculptures of Gabrielle Lusser Rico.
The second step (the author is not particularly rigid about the order in which these steps should be followed) is to create a "string," which is a list of the denotations of the word.
The third step is the "exploration" of the word's associations and connotations.
There are two problems with the way the above information is summarized and illustrated in this book.
The first, which is minor, is that the explanatory text is scattered throughout the book. For me to understand the artist's method required a lot of paging back and forth in the book aside from looking at the illustrations. It struck me as odd that a book about a method of integrating drawing and text wasn't successful in doing so in a didactic fashion. This is an organizational issue, however, and not unusual.
The second problem I had with this book is more significant: a flaw in the way the publisher chose to display the glyphix. Many of these truly exquisite drawings are spread across two pages, which means that a good part of the drawing runs into, and is cut off by, the bindings in the center of the book (I think this is called the "gutter" in bookbinder's terms). This seriously diminishes their impact, and the ability of the reader to enjoy and absorb them. Those glyphix that appear on a single page, with explanatory text on the facing page, are much more pleasing to the eye.
The choice to make the book smaller, and the glyphix larger, while it may have decreased the cost of the book, impairs the visual value of the art portrayed as well. It's a shame that such a business decision was made in production, because the concept is truly useful.
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