Diaglyphic Monad. For Doctor Dee

1993. ELY, Timothy. Diaglyphic Monad. For Doctor Dee. One-of-a-kind manuscript book. 80 pp. Illustrated with 40 painted and drawn folios plus painted endpapers, drawn and painted throughout by Timothy Ely with each page containing drawings in ink, dry pigments, watercolour, gouache, dilute acrylics and gilded metals. 8vo., 233 x 140 mm, bound in a hand-painted relief binding consisting of heavy boards, with symbolic writing and mathematical equations intermixed with cosmological symbols, black morocco spine preserved in a new cloth box. Portland, Oregon: T. Ely, 1993. Unique painted manuscript. Signed and dated by the artist on the title page. Timothy Ely's Diaglyphic Monad is a visual laboratory, a metaphysical realm, consisting of symbolic images of architecture, floor-plans, 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. PROVENANCE: Thomas Vroom with his bookplate on the front paste-down.