Note: now available as an eBook, hardback and paperback books on Amazon worldwide. Also its Limited Edition version is a work in process.

Artist's Book, Prints and Travelling Exhibition.

This ongoing "work in progress" project by Des Kilfeather currently comprises the evolution of 30 images of scanned or photographed watercolour marks made on pages of a found, 1966 copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The work includes the original source book, with pencilled comments by a previous unknown reader.

James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a Visual Response, represents a continuation of Kilfeather’s philosophical exploration of ethics and time. Referring to Aristotle and Joyce and drawing on his own personal experience of Irish Catholic culture, the work was, apparently contradicting his previous processes in that it was Kilfeather’s emotional and reactionary response to his first reading of the book. Kilfeather absorbed the texts, made abstract watercolour marks onto pages of the book, plein air, high resolution photographed these then applied a process of semi-destruction of the book in the sea.

To resolve this phase, Kilfeather scanned pages containing anonymous handwritten comments, prepared digital files and published Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a Visual Response, as an eBook. Materials and processes establish the connection between Joyce’s early 20th Century, Kilfeather’s critical 1966 and contemporary culture.

The evolutionary objective is to further establish these connections using contemporary photogravure plate making with intaglio and mixed media digital printing with silk screen to create a series of original limited edition prints, the first of which, Page 221, has been completed and selected for the National Open Art Exhibitions 2013. Page 221 the intaglio print is being exhibited as part of NOA13 at the Royal College of Art London and Minerva Theatre Chichester in October and November 2013, click on About DP Kilfeather for dates.

Page 221 was editioned (7) in collaboration with master printmaker David Borrington of Dekkle Studios.

A sample from the collection of 30 digital prints is provided below; best viewed by clicking on the slideshow button.

By kind permission of Heinemann Educational Books Ltd and Pearson Education Ltd.