Irish Monks Go Digital

There was a time when the the bril­liant illu­min­ated manu­scripts of Irish Mon­as­ter­ies rep­res­en­ted the pas­sion­ate col­lec­tion of the works of the sol­it­ary monk/artisan/craftsman. The intric­ate knot pat­terns are a study in a real pat­tern lan­guage. Years ago, when my cre­at­ive juices were sought a middle ground between a clear sys­tem­atic approach and yearn­ing to find break out of these same sys­tems, I dis­covered the work of George and Iain Bain. — father and son. The elder Bain made a life­time study of find­ing the pat­terns in the knot­work and devis­ing tech­niques to allow oth­ers to appre­ci­ate these and to rep­lic­ate these celtic mas­ter­works for them­selves. His son built on these tech­niques to devise a an even sim­pler way of cre­at­ing the ela­bour­ate designs. I was hooked and pro­duced some large scale knot pat­terns. I also dis­covered the won­der of dood­ling in square and tri­an­gu­lar knot pat­terns. At one point I even delved into zoomorph­ical celtic art­work and dic­sov­ered and even lar­ger challenge.

As of late I have not spent the time to keep up with my knots. You’ll note that the logo on the top left corner of this blog is actu­ally a very simple celtic knot. A dec­ade ago I star­ted using Abobe Illus­trator to assemble these knots and developed a cer­tain tech­nique to accom­plish what I needed. When I did the Ran­do­mos­ity logo I aimed for sim­pli­city, not just for aes­teht­ics, but admit­tedly because I had lost my famili­ar­ity with the tech­nique. This morn­ing, I wanted to throw a quick knot on an icon for the iPhone/ITouch dash­board and felt I needed a knot. To my dis­may I couldn’t find my ori­ginal art­work for the logo and was about to turn to Illus­trator to craft some­thing quickly. I happened to do a quick search and stumbled on The Celtic Knot Font. While I may have toyed with the idea of put­ting little knots into a font (in my font design days) I don’t think I thought of tak­ing the Bain sys­tem and assem­bling a font that could be used to cre­ate pat­terns using indi­vidual let­ters as the build­ing blocks. The cre­ator (knot­worker) Daniel Isdell has craf­ted a bril­liant sys­tem! I imme­di­ately had to pur­chase one of these fonts to play with. The crafts­man­ship is superb and the wealth of tutori­als and examples at the site get you up and run­ning imme­di­ately. They have fonts in a vari­ety of formats (out­line, inverse, obverse and now 3D) avail­able. The most simple pat­tern uses the nine keys to the imme­di­ate left of the key­board and pro­duces one of the most famil­iar pat­terns. You simply choose a font size and ensure that your lead­ing is set to 0. Instant knot pat­tern. This is very, very impress­ive and cool.

How­ever (and there’s always a but) when reflect­ing on the nature of celtic ‘knoti­cisme’, part of the knot jour­ney is the jour­ney itself. So in that sense I am cheat­ing and I feel like I am. The real­ity is that I must again find and take the time to play with the knots, ima­gin­ing them in my own mind and then mak­ing the trans­form­a­tion myself from ima­gined through my fin­gers into fruition. The cre­at­ive jour­ney is a very med­it­at­ive and rest­ful pas­time. The tool is won­der­ful and for many uses this is the appro­pri­ate tool. If I were cre­at­ing a web­site, or con­struct­ing a nee­dle­work pat­tern for fur­ther craft­ing, then this is part of a big­ger pro­cess. When part of the joy of the pro­cess is in the ima­gin­ing, this tool may elim­in­ate that and this is where I feel I am cut­ting corners. This is not a cri­ti­cism of the tool itself (I think it is bril­liant and applaud the sys­tem­atic devis­ing of pat­tern that went into it), merely a reflec­tion on the nature of the pro­cess and of when the tool sub­tracts from the end res­ult. But that is very con­tex­tual and I am simply reminded of the tre­mend­ous grat­i­fic­a­tion and sat­is­fac­tion derived from the hours spent craft­ing knots with ink and paper.

What would the pre-medieval Irish monks think?