Celtic Art: Book of Kells - Letters

I have always been interested in Celtic Art, more so when I had the opportunity to visit an exhibition here in Cologne in the mid 80s and see the Book of Kells. The next time would be in its ‘residence’ in Trinity college library Dublin, nearly 30 years later (see “Playing truant to see ‘The Book’”). Also this is where my name ‘Book’ comes from for this blog.

My first book of Celtic Art I bought in London in the late 70s and is from George Bain, a true classic in this field. One of the first I think of its kind, in that it shows you how the knot work was constructed and so one could try it out.

This I did at work! I was working in the Pathology at the time and our boss was away in the States at a congress or something. It was summer break and most of our PhD students were not around so there was no real work to do apart from keeping our cell cultures alive and looking after the mice (see “Mice hand reared en masse’). My colleagues B and U started a ritual at the time by bringing Zwiebelbrot und Leberwurst (onion bread and liver sausage) each day for a late breakfast until I couldn’t stand/stomach it anymore as this went on for two weeks!

To keep myself occupied between Z&L self inflicted doses, feeding cultures and white mice, I started to draw on paper examples from the Bain book. I still have them a little tea stained and wrinkled but still intact.
The examples in the book showed not only how the knot work was constructed, but also how to complete evenly a border layout for when turning corners of the page.

The sizes of the original art work was not apparent to me until I saw the following illustration and the size given. To get a more detailed look click on the picture right and look at the lower left corner. It says one and a third inches in diameter which is 3.4 cm! This was made in about 800 AD, just absolutely extraordinary!
Many years later after recovering from Z&L nightmares, I tried to create, that is reproduce / copy some of the Celtic letters that appear at the begin of the scripture texts.
I in no way tried to draw then in the original size, I was to have enough on my hands trying not to shake about and smearing everything. Here are three letters I painted.

The first letter I did was a ‘T’ in the memory of me Dad. I used ‘Plate T’ from the Bain book as reference as it wasn’t coloured. A section of the original from the Book of Kells is shown here (see right).
As you can see I didn’t try and copy it exact, only used the colours I had at hand.



The ‘h’ and ‘R’ were for colleagues in my Immunology lab.
Lucky I made pictures of them before giving them away.
I haven’t tried to paint any other letters till now.
I started to tie knots instead (see ‘Getting Knotted’).