Egyptian Travelogue: Emily and Papyrus

I am reading Emily Dickinson and feel her presence not only across my glass table but everywhere I venture, though crowds still seem to eclipse her. We are in a different landscape from Amherst.

In the process of fathoming her poetry; I feel enormously the need to push beyond paper. Papyrus as I have discovered is a perfect medium to express dimensionality/new circumferences. When I portray a house, rendered more or less in its actual existence on paper, I am pleased with its external dimensions.

When I portray the same image on papyrus, I seem invited to "open up" the image through wiping, rubbing and blotting. Using gum Arabic rather than water assures a torrent of image obliterating liquid that will not destroy the fibers of the papyrus, but will create the capacity to get inside the house without leaving its outside existence.

After blotting, I see images fading into the fibers thus providing me an opportunity to obliterate the image and celebrate its after images as something closer to the content of what I want. The house becomes a home. " Nature is a Haunted House—but Art is a House that tries to be Haunted." In other words, paper provides a surface reliability; papyrus celebrates dimension or in Emily’s case, larger circumferences.