Artist's Corner: Kremena Dimitrova - Blogpost 8

Follow Kremena's journey into the 50 Jewish Objects in this eight blogpost.

In this blogpost, I will share and explain some of my design decisions and my processes and approaches when responding to the manuscript.

The Sefer Mitzvot Qatan (Semaq) was produced manually; it was manually written by different scribes and manually illuminated and illustrated by different hands. In contrast, I decided to create my visual response entirely digitally (as a digital collage) by deconstructing and reconstructing the manuscript, thus corresponding to the modern technological processes of digitisation that rule our 21C lives. 

In the manuscript, the Hebrew text is central while the illuminations and illustrations are marginal. In my creative response, I reversed their order of importance and functionality by making the illuminations and illustrations central, whereas the Hebrew text serves a decorative purpose. The text I have used is written in English, so as many people as possible can understand it. I decided to make the grotesque hybrid creatures in the margins of the manuscript less grotesque and more central to the narrative too. I wondered how they would look if made more colourful and if adding colours to them would make them more visually appealing. When swapping and rearranging the comic strips pillars, each time new hybrid creatures will be formed. 

I used the few floral designs from the main illuminated pages to create new repeat patterns for the top parts of each comic strip pillar. I used sepia colours which are reminiscent of and echoing the past. As I don’t know how Isaac ben Joseph or the scribes and illuminators who helped him produce the manuscript looked like, I decided to visualise them as silhouettes.