Terrance Lindall Embellishes the Wickenheiser Quarto

Terrance Lindall is adding colorful, even intricate images to embellish the margins of the Paradise Lost quarto that he illustrated for Professor Robert Wickenheiser:

Bob [Wickenheiser] asked me to embellish the 8 1/2 x 11 quarto edition that only had printing and no drawings on [the] border. I am using magic marker, ink and color pencil. As [fellow artist] Dario [Rivarossa] knows, using ink and magic marker requires a bit of perfection. The second you put the pen on paper it must proceed perfectly . . . like Mozart's [method of] putting down his compositions. One cannot erase. So far with about 30 of the some 40 pages done I have not made any of what I would consider mistakes. Here are some of the pages. I may work on these a little more.

Let's take a look at those three pages Terrance sent:

Terrance is updating an old Medieval aesthetic, namely, marginal illustrations, and he's doing so very generously:

By the way, I am doing this extra work at no expense for Bob. It is a gift to a great scholar, a great collector, a generous human being and a transformational leader. A very unique and rare type of human. And besides, the quarto is going to the greatest collection of its kind.

What does Professor Wickenheiser say about his copy of the quarto? In an email, these words:

[T]his is only one of two copies of the quarto (as my elephant [folio] is only one of two), [such] that it and the elephant folio enhance substantively the focus of my Milton collection on illustrated Milton, especially illustrated P[aradise] L[ost], and, finally, [such] that the quarto and elephant folio editions are central to the substantial collection of original Lindall illustrated P[aradise] L[ost] and Lindalliana which I am fortunate to have in my collection.

I might add that Terrance is playing a significant role in helping Professor Wickenheiser make his collection the very best with respect to illustrated texts of Miltonia and Paradise Lost by contemporary artists. I'm hoping that Terrance's many illustrations for my story, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, will also be included in Professor Wickenheiser's collection since so much of the story is inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost!

These are merely three of the forty pages scheduled for embellishing, but we can comment, as I did for the first one of the three images in an email to Terrance:

Very nice. I like the tension between the bolts from above and the darker fire from below -- is that the divine-diabolical conflict?

In this query, I was linking the dark-tipped pitchfork images to the words about "black fire . . . shot among His angels," to which would be opposed God's thunderous bolts, these also depicted, in the upper margin to the first image.

The strains of music visible above the heavenly muse in the second image probably require no explanation,for this sizeable marginal image -- enhancing the yet marginally larger image on the page -- is self-explanatory and need not be harped upon.

The third image -- of Satan and Sin in 'love' -- may require some liminal remarks, however. Atop the image, we see weird strains of music, along with four-leaved plants, followed in the vertical margins by strange pod-shaped depictions worthy of The Body Snatchers! Under these pods, both vertically and horizontally arranged, are more of those weird strains of music . . . or are these spermatozoa?! Is heaven playing their song? This is prior to the expulsion of the fallen angels, so they're all still in heaven, and we do see a passionate heart, as well as imagery showing Satan enamored of his lover, Sin, whom he's busy impregnating with Death. Thus . . . spermatozoa, dancing to "The Twist"? This relationship will surely end on a sour note, not least because Sin is Satan's daughter. Although my reading of the imagery may seem to fit, only Terrance can confirm, or disconfirm, its accuracy.

I'd like to see the entire forty pages when Terrance has finished . . .