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ELY, Timothy. Onomystrya. One-of-a-kind manuscript book. 20 pp., consisting of title with 18 painted and drawn folios, drawn and painted throughout by Timothy Ely with each page containing drawings in ink, dry pigments, watercolour, gouache, dilute acrylics and gilded metals. 8vo, 375 x 225 mm., bound in black metallic on boards, relief lettering with decorative highlights, preserved in new cloth box. Portland, Oregon: Timothy Ely, 1994. Unique painted manuscript. Timothy Ely's Onomystrya is a visual laboratory, a metaphysical realm, consisting of symbolic images of architecture, floorplans, geometry, perspective, celestial spheres, phantasmagoric spaces, ideograms, horizons and symbolic mathematical writing. The mystical text, labeled "cribiform" by the artist, is a hybrid of scripts by ancient scribes, engravers and calligraphers, Chinese characters, ciphers, Egyptian hieroglyphics, cryptographs, codes and various secret writings. The cribiform is meant to function "as an intermediary to other types of meaning." Certainly, the connection to Carl Jung's theories on single marks and symbols as messages from the collective unconscious comes immediately to mind. This painted manuscript echoes the style and interpretative world of illustrated works of Pacioli, Vitruvius, Serlio, Boullée, Tyco Brahe, Mercator, Celarius, Leonardo and Galileo, as well as evoking the modern sensibility of Max Ernst and Iliazd, as seen in their masterpiece Maximiliana of 1964. Timothy Ely began making books in the 1950s with one surviving example from that time: a small cookbook covered in stars. Ely has taught bookbinding, drawing and creativity workshops in many places in the world from Scandinavia to Central America. His books and other works can be found in museums and libraries, most extensively in the United States and Europe.
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