Robert Brinkerhoff to McNair Email #9

I have a couple of ideas for you, attached.

 

Cover001 is essentially trying to simultaneously elicit a sense of solemnity and hope, while ambiguously positioning the house (our material, earthly abode, with all its cares and constraints) as alternately unfastening itself and refastening—detaching and/or regrounding. There’s a light on (optimism) and a light off (despair) in the house. I think this one gives Carl some options for type.

Covers 002 and 003 are a bit more dense, metaphorically, so bear with me. This was actually my first idea and I’m trying hard to make it work. It features a figure, who is both man and night sky, arching over the house. If you can’t see the figure clearly enough let me know. I can make some adjustments to it.

I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Egyptian mythology at all, but I returned repeatedly to the image of Nut, the sky goddess, when cycling through the notions of becoming detached from the material constraints of the world, reconciling through beauty/hope/spiritual affirmation, and then reattaching, refastening, re-grounding. In the way the body arches into the sky and back down again (actually becoming sky) Nut represents many cycles—life and death, day and night, etc. 

 

I was drawn to the way that her body is grounded on earth but also the sky, and the way that the human figure becomes something which transcends its physical, material limitations.  

 

Here’s a little about Nut from Wikipedia:

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Nut was the goddess of the sky and all heavenly bodies, a symbol of protecting the dead when they enter the afterlife. According to the Egyptians, during the day, the heavenly bodies—such as the sun and moon—would make their way across her body. Then, at dusk, they would be swallowed, pass through her belly during the night, and be reborn at dawn.^[11]

Nut is also the barrier separating the forces of chaos from the ordered cosmos in the world. She was pictured as a woman arched on her toes and fingertips over the earth; her body portrayed as a star-filled sky. Nut’s fingers and toes were believed to touch the four cardinal points or directions of north, south, east, and west.

Because of her role in saving Osiris, Nut was seen as a friend and protector of the dead, who appealed to her as a child appeals to its mother: “O my Mother Nut, stretch Yourself over me, that I may be placed among the imperishable stars which are in You, and that I may not die.” Nut was thought to draw the dead into her star-filled sky, and refresh them with food and wine: “I am Nut, and I have come so that I may enfold and protect you from all things evil.”^[12]

She was often painted on the inside lid of the sarcophagus, protecting the deceased. The vaults of tombs were often painted dark blue with many stars as a representation of Nut. The Book of the Dead says, “Hail, thou Sycamore Tree of the Goddess Nut! Give me of the water and of the air which is in thee. I embrace that throne which is in Unu, and I keep guard over the Egg of Nekek-ur. It flourisheth, and I flourish; it liveth, and I live; it snuffeth the air, and I snuff the air, I the Osiris Ani, whose word is truth, in peace.”