id est: neo scribalist asemic expressionism by Michael Jacobson is Forthcoming from Post-Asemic Press in Mid-September 2023

I am excited to announce that the proof copy for my next hardcover book arrived from the printers. The work is titled id est: neo scribalist asemic expressionism. It's an abstract illuminated manuscript that will be available in mid-September 2023 from Post-Asemic Press. The book collects 73 paintings that I created after a long absence (since 2001) from doing art with a brush and paint. The mediums I used in the codex were gouache paint and watercolor pencils on watercolor paper. The paintings were scanned at a high resolution and printed in full color. I wrote a 5 page introduction to the book to give context and history about how this project came together. The book will be released on my 50th birthday, on 9/11/2023. 

The manuscript contains my visually poetic story about going through the lowest depth of my life experience with schizoaffective disorder and how spirituality, friends, family, art, creativity, stories, and medication brought me out of the abyss. There are no words in the main text, instead, the book utilizes abstract art and asemic writing to express my adventure with mental illness. But this work is much more than a commentary on my negative condition. This illumination is a brief chromatic text of asemic storytelling, illustrated with the totality of my experience connecting to an altered state of consciousness. To put it bluntly: I went through mental hell and came out a rebel optimist!

 

For id est, I have raided the art world for ideas to inspire my writing and artistry. It is these creative influences in art history, of which there are many, that are synthesized in my writing and art. Ultimately, this codex is an artifact I have composed in an attempt to make the old new and fresh. For me, this area, now specifically christened as asemic writing is one of the most dynamic areas of human creativity because it has transformed something as ancient as proto-writing into many vast manifestations of contemporary scribal invention. Not every page in the manuscript has asemic writing as a focus because I wanted the work to blend and flow seamlessly from abstract art into my non-verbal calligraphy. Every page in this book is unique, but all the paintings have a similar style and signature. I strive towards an intimate universality in the aesthetics of my work, at least that is my intent.

 id est is my discovery of artistic purpose while existing in a technological world of machines, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology; I am simultaneously embracing the future and the past, and I am keeping my human creative spirit alive in a plastic world. This book is my attempt to revive and modernize scribal culture and continue onward with my asemic science-fiction calligraphic scripts; my reason is to spiritually document my high-tech existence with low-tech art tools. I am excited and overwhelmed with tech; I use it every day but also feel that human creativity is urgently needed to check and balance the machines. Neo-expressionism but not perfectionism is my main guide in creating this manuscript, since computers do a better job at precision than myself, and I lack a technical robot brain. 

The book is a summary of my personal metamorphosis from being a wild pagan in my youth, to being confirmed as a Lutheran, to my spiritual evolution into Agnostic Pantheism as a middle-aged man. id est is the documentation of this process of spiritual aging, and the eternal spirits dwelling in the heaven and hell in my own mind. 

My goal is to have id est available to as broad a spectrum of potential readers/viewers as possible. Therefore, I entrust the Internet with this hand-painted silent story for print-on-demand distribution; though it will only be available for offline perusal; maybe someday I will do an e-book, but right now I am a little fatigued with reading books online, and feel a need to return to the dark academic sanctuary of handwriting on paper, rare tomes, and libraries. I hope this book will appeal to people interested in contemporary 21st century art, illuminated manuscripts, abstract calligraphy, visual poetry, illustrated volumes, poem brut, asemic writing, and artist's books. 

The book will be released by Post-Asemic Press in mid-September of 2023: Click here to purchase id est at Amazon.

Here are some sample images from the book:

Here is a link to some sample pages from id est on YouTube:  https://youtu.be/Qpq0LwltkEY