“A psychiatrist insisted I journalwrite every morning as soon as I awoke. Three pages freehand.  Did not matter what I wrote. Did not matter about spelling, composition, punctuation or style. The point was to purge.” – Carla Tak

Carla Tak began journaling at 34 and continued the effort as a daily ritual until she was 50. As a form of personal psychotherapy, the journals offered the opportunity to explore the unrestrained truth of her feelings in the years before she began her art practice. In her rhythmic looping style, Tak spilled out stories of hardship, sadness and devastation. There was a lot of swearing. As the point was to release, not chronicle, her emotions, Tak would often layer one sentence over another pushing the visual effect of the page toward abstraction. She found beauty among this chaos. 

Of the thousands of pages written over the years, only 5 individual sheets were retained and the rest were burnt – a purging of the purge. The artistry in these pages was only considered years later after Tak began her painting career. In hindsight, the journal writing proved to be a gateway to Tak’s artistry, acting as the creative release for all the emotions that she would later build into her lyrical abstract work. Intimate and intriguing, the limited edition journal prints bear witness to the power of self-reflection and the marvel of transformation. Woven into this tangle of calligraphy is a story of struggle and resolve, hope and heartache and redemption. Patterns of thinking spooled into a magic box of abstraction that still offer a meditative value 

Expertly printed in collaboration with Peter Braune of New Leaf Editions, each signed limited print, in either black or amber, is part of an edition of 30. These intaglio prints are struck from a copper plate using the chine-Colle technique which allows the image to be printed onto the delicate surface of hand-made Japanese tissue paper while also being bonded to a more durable backing page made of archival rag paper. The resulting print achieves a subtle elegance that is quietly affecting, like a poem you read quietly aloud yourself in your head searching for meaning and a connection.  

• Barry Dumka

© Barry Dumka/BCREATIVE CONSULTING