RAY HAS LONG BEEN MESMERIZED by the idea of there being a Stephen Hawking, and more that there WAS a Stephen Hawking. Many things just wander out of the darkness of Ray's mental shelves of experiences and Stephen Hawking is one of them. Recently Ray had the idea to do something about it. Some thoughts just linger around and sometimes it just takes time to act on them. And some of those times it takes too long.
Ink + poetry + book + ? = Stephen Hawking x cosmos
RAY'S NEWEST CREATIVE BOOK PROJECT to come out of Lead Graffiti is How Ink Writes Poetry. Click on the photo above to get that part of the story first. A way to extend that project has started to coalesce into a dream among dreams. Ray's idea was to produce a series of 5 books pursuing the notion of ink as an illustrator that would connect Lead Graffiti with a new level of collaboration, ending with Stephen Hawking.
Just this past Saturday (March 10, 2018), Ray found a great interim step to help establish a connection to Stephen Hawking as the ultimate step. Each new book in the "ink pulls" series would form the foundation for the next with the final goal being to get Stephen Hawking to write on the subject of his choice in 8 steps with Ray's ink pulls forming the imagery.
You are probably sitting there reading this and saying to yourself, "No way!" Honestly, that was Ray's reaction, but he likes saying it is a challenge and not a wall. There was a way to get there. He just needed to find the map.
Just four short days have passed since Ray approached Mark Dimunation, Chief of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Library of Congress, about doing one of the books. He loved the idea of the project and readily agreed to contribute to its success and didn't laugh when the Stephen Hawking element was explained. But fate has intervened in the original dream of the complete series with the passing of Stephen Hawking on March 14, 2018.
Ray has read Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time, four times. He said he didn't understand a lot of it, but oddly, he didn't notice because the book was written in a way that left you with the feeling that you would figure it out eventually. Ray will surely figure out a way to do that ultimate How Ink Illustrates book sometime. Maybe this was some force of the universe saying, "Don't just get an idea. Act on it."
"Now."
"Before it's too late."
Stay tuned.