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Craftsman Beau Dumesnil illuminates the past

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Beau Dumesnil stretches reams of parchment onto a table in his dusty studio space. Over by the wall is a freezer full of the skins of various animals — deer, sheep, etc. — and a few packs of Fla-Vor-Ice for hotter-than-normal Texas summers.

“It got bit by a rattlesnake in Copper’s Cove,” he said, laying out one of the sheep parchments. “The younger the animal, the thinner the material. Or the sicker the animal.”

Dumesnil has had a space at The Art Studio Inc. since 1998, making his own parchment, pens, pencils and glue from various materials such as goose feathers and scraps of dead animal skin. From these materials, he produces his own illuminated manuscripts, or other pieces like a Viking shield, using the techniques and materials ancient Norse craftsmen did.

“I’m making cheese glue in order to bind the slats together,” he said, pointing at two wooden slats in the corner. “Then the hide glue is for the fabric wrap. I’m going to bind the fabric wrap on it to reinforce the round shield.”

Dumesnil started studying calligraphy and illumination in 2002, but he said what really sparked his interest in ancient craftsmanship was an exhibition he had at TASI in 2004 called, “Space Race of the Middle Ages.”

“I made interstellar rockets that had a religious theme,” he said. “Like, the different religions were racing to spread the good word to the heathen aliens.” Dumesnil laughed. “I was young then.”

Dumesnil said the exhibit was inspired by Poul Anderson’s novel, “High Crusade,” in which aliens land on Earth during the Crusades and get overrun.

“That was the premise, you take a medieval mindset to the cosmos,” he said. “They rush the spaceship because one of the aliens takes a zapper and zaps one of them. They just bum-rush the ship and once they get in, it takes off, as a failsafe. Once it lands on an alien planet, the next thing you know, they take over the cosmos, these crusaders.”

Working on the exhibition sparked Dumesnil’s interest in illumination, which can take a painstaking amount of time and attention to detail. Dumesnil compared the mindfulness of calligraphy and illumination to meditation.

“Each stroke is like a focused effort,” he said. “It may not seem like much, and the more you practice the more you get skilled with it, but you need to be in the zone when you’re making that letter form.”

There are a variety of different systems of handwriting, from Gothic calligraphy to Spencerian penmanship and more. Dumesnil said the key to Spencerian writing — a form popularized by business teacher Platt Rogers Spencer during the Antebellum period of American history — is to not move the wrist.

“You move your arm, you don’t move your wrist,” he said. “If you move your wrist, it comes out crooked.”

Dumesnil studies manuscripts in the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, an online, digitized collection stretching back through history.

Dumesnil then produces all his own materials using authentic techniques learned from reading texts that date to Pliny the Elder of Ancient Rome or manuscripts handed down from affluent patrons of medieval society.

“That’s the only reason this stuff exists, because a rich person wanted to know about it,” he said. “They had other techniques that were spread word-of-mouth, and there were a few enterprising artists that actually catalogued this stuff, because some rich person who had nothing better to do was like, ‘How do you do this stuff?’ And they were like, ‘Please, I’ll pay you to write a book.’ And so they wrote a book.”

Skills can include how to make a pen — pelican feathers work well, according to Dumensil, especially their primary flight feathers, where the finger tips would be — or how to make pigments for illumination from green verdigris and yellow orpiment. Dumesnil said the original illuminators would sometimes hide their most-treasured secrets with intentional mistakes.

“Like in ‘Fight Club’ when they said to make good napalm, you mix gasoline and orange juice,” he said. Chuck Palahniuk, the author of “Fight Club,” left a few ingredients out of the recipe in case an entrepreneurial reader copied it. “They would say things like, ‘You definitely don’t want to mix white lead with green verdigris.’ Which is false. It’s a lie. I know because I’ve mixed the two together and they don’t react.”

The 44-year-old Groves native often works with background noise on the TV or on the radio, usually news shows like “Meet the Press” or “Face the Nation,” which Dumesnil said helps him focus on his work.

“It’s like meditating,” he said. “You’re thinking about your breathing, but you’re also thinking about not thinking about anything. Same thing. Whenever you’re writing for art’s sake, you need to be focused on just that and nothing else. Some people go to the Buddhist temple. For me, Gothic calligraphy. That’s my jam.”

The Art Studio, Inc.
Where: 720 Franklin St.
Hours: 2 p.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday
Phone: (409) 838-5393
Website: artstudio.org

Tim Collins is a freelance writer.


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