Death and Transfiguration: An Interview with Barry Moser
Barry Moser of Pennyroyal Press is best known as the designer and illustrator for the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, a limited, 400-copy, hand-letterpress edition of the Authorised (King James) Version that took 5 years to complete. Prior to becoming a bookmaker, Moser had an interest in biblical studies and held a preacher’s license in the Methodist church.
A few of Moser’s illustrations for the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible appear with this interview and other texts in this issue of tNP. They have described in Newsweek as “engravings with the brooding power of magical realism.” Moser’s Pennyroyal Caxton Bible artist proof prints are currently showing at Signs of Life Gallery in Lawrence, KS, and are available for purchase through the gallery. At a recent showing there, Moser answered questions asked about his work.
The New Pantagruel:
How would you describe the style of your Biblical engravings? Does that style reflect a particular view of the Scriptures?
Barry Moser, “Potiphar’s Wife”
Barry Moser:
Style is a tricky term for me. I can look at the whole of my work and see, over the span of decades, a change in style, but I am not sure that this means much more than a record of my learning how to do what I do. If we look for style in terms of content and we look at a more recent cross-section of my work I see an obvious tendency towards the dark and the grotesque, of death and transfiguration — most of my work for children’s books to the contrary. If, on the other hand we are looking for “style” in terms of the “look” of the work I will also have to fall back on “dark.” But in this case it is the nature of the medium that proffers that darkness, not my intention or personality. Wood engraving is a dark medium, period. And when I make watercolors I tend to work, not as the old traditions have it (from light to dark), but from dark to light. Somebody once commented in the New York Times that my watercolors have “the intellectual muscle of the burin.” I take this to be an affirmation that both media, as I use them — and especially engraving — are literary media and lend them selves happily and naturally to illustration.
If I have a particular view of the Scriptures it would be as literature, and in the main, dark literature. This is not to say that I am unmindful of the overarching redemption and light that the Scriptures offer to those that seek it. Again, it’s largely a matter of death and transfiguration.
The New Pantagruel:
How do you see yourself in relationship to the tradition of Western art? Are there influences on your work that come from outside this tradition?
It is always a bit of a shock for me to see my illustrative prints out of context. They were invented and designed to be seen in a cradle of type. They were designed to be held in the lap, seen more or less from above, and to pick up the light that falls on a curving surface, that is, the page of a book.
Barry Moser:
In terms of spontaneity, of seizing the happy accident, of thinking of myself as merely a part of the whole process, of having unusually high regard for my tools and materials, and of seeing my work as a part of some purpose more important than my own ego, then yes, I do see myself outside the typical Western tradition. I am not sure it’s exactly Eastern, but it sure as hell ain’t Western, at least as I understand that term.
However, in that there is a strong narrative mode in my work, I see myself very much a part of the Western tradition, especially that period from the early Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. Most of what happened after that leaves me pretty cold — with marvelous and wonderful exceptions like Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko and too many others to mention. I do not, however, belong to their tradition except in that we all share a commonality in some Eastern thought.
In either case, it’s not something I brood over. I just get up in the morning and get down to work. “Work, work, work,” as my friend Donald Hall often says. That is the ethic I subscribe to and the tradition to which my mind, hands, heart, and soul belong.
The New Pantagruel:
Can you describe how your art gives viewers the opportunity to see an old text with new eyes or experience the familiar as unfamiliar?
Barry Moser:
It’s nothing profound. I try to spot the typical and the expected and avoid them as if they were a pair of rabid dogs. For instance, why on earth would I want to make my Alice look like the Alice that Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel invented? My Scarecrow to look like Ray Bolger? My Frankenstein monster like Boris Karloff? My Jesus like Warner Sallman’s? I see no need to feed an audience more of the same old stuff. It would bore me to death to do that, and I figure that if it would bore me it would surely bore my audience too. And since it is really not all that hard to cut a new path to the waterfall why not bring out the machete of the imagination, and the old axe of invention, and clear a new way? I am not sure that this guarantees the viewer an “opportunity to see an old text with new eyes or experience the familiar as unfamiliar,” but I am certain it will neither certify nor verify familiarity as verity. There is, after all, no one way to see things. No one way to imagine what, after all, is merely imagined.
Barry Moser, “David”
The New Pantagruel:
By all accounts, Biblical illiteracy in the West is on the rise. Do you see the visual arts having any role in reversing this trend? Should they?
Barry Moser:
Insofar as the art of our time having any real sense of responsibility other than to its own mongrel existence, its own petty preoccupation with the slightest injury of its ego, its preoccupation with shock and “originality” (as if anything is really shocking anymore, or as if all things don’t have antecedents somewhere) I see the visual arts promising at best a very small role in reversing the trend of which you speak. Not only Biblical illiteracy, but literacy on all fronts. Lost is the narrative mandate — at least so far as I can tell.
Should they? Perhaps. From my small vantage point, certainly. Those of us with voice need to speak. Some of us do. But I am afraid that the emancipation process, that is the emancipation from responsibility beyond the arrogantly narcissistic, has already gone so far that all we have to look forward to in the near future is happy indulgence and nonjudgmental criticism — with notable exceptions, of course.
I am reminded of the answer Albert Camus gave when he was asked what the responsibility of the artist was. If I recall correctly, his reply was that the artist has no responsibility but to work. But “as a man” he said, the artist has a responsibility to speak for those who have no voice to speak with.
The New Pantagruel:
As works of art in their own right, how do you think the prints work without the text of the Bible around them?
Barry Moser:
It is always a bit of a shock for me to see my illustrative prints out of context. They were invented and designed to be seen in a cradle of type. They were designed to be held in the lap, seen more or less from above, and to pick up the light that falls on a curving surface, that is, the page of a book. To see them divorced from these constructs deprives them of their proper environment. But that’s just me speaking — their daddy. If I step side and consider each its own individual merits, then I think they work well in that alien environment, especially if a copy or a reproduction of the original environment is handy.
The New Pantagruel:
One final question: Why the Bible? Were there any unique hurdles to overcome on this project? How, if at all, did the work of illustration change your view of the Bible?
Barry Moser:
I taught myself the arts of typography and book design. If you do that you find out very quickly that all the great monuments of printing have been Bibles. As a friend of mine put it, you can walk the history of printing on the spines of Bibles. I simply wanted to join the club, you might say. I was also aware that no artist in the twentieth century had undertaken the entire thing as a book in the codex form. Salvador Dali did a couple dozen prints for a Biblia Sacra (a Latin Bible), but they were literally stuck in after the book was printed. Also he did most of his images for the new Testament which seems a mite off-balance to me. And of course Marc Chagall did a suite of etchings for the Tanakh, the Jewish form of what Christians call the Old Testament. But the Chagall images never appeared in codex form, only as a boxed portfolio with scriptural quotations, again, so far as I know. I figured somebody ought to have the gumption to do it, so why not me?
Barry Moser, “The Nativity”
The biggest hurdle was overcoming the fear of appearing to be arrogant. I mean what, after all, can I bring to this monument that others before me have not brought to it? Who am I to presume to have anything of value to offer? That, and the interior fear of knowing that every time I made an image I would be taking a theological postion and that would expose me not only to charges of arrogance, but also of naivety and stupidity. That makes an old country boy like me a mite nervous, and for this reason I assembled a committee of advisors, people who are experts in Judaica, theology, New Testament, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and the like.
On the practical side of things was the finances. A project like this does not come cheap, and as Flannery O’Connor said, neither God nor posterity is served by ill-made objects. If you are going to do a Bible it has to be done to the nines, as it were. You cannot skimp on anything. I was fortunate in having sound financing from a single individual: Bruce Kovner, CEO of the Caxton Corporation and bibliophile. He was the bank for the project and funded it to the tune of two million dollars. You can do the math. That’s just at five grand a book just to build it.
I cannot say that my perception of the Bible changed much. I entered into the project with an enormous respect for it and if anything my respect deepened, especially with the writings of Paul, who until my re-encounter with him, I had held suspicious. Reading him again showed me that he was a very smart and perceptive writer.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.1.
