Asonic Writing - New invention

[Cecil Touchon]

I started the day with some coffee and starting my journal for the day, just the date and time I awoke. Then I read a chapter of The Notebook – A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. This is a book that I referenced in this article: https://www.touchonian.com/p/paper-trail-on-the-cross-cultural.

I was intrigued enough to go ahead and buy the book and so far it is a very interesting read. I figure notebooks are in my general wheelhouse artistically and I have and do keep notebooks but more for asemic writing and noting down ideas for ‘symphonic drawing’ so I think more in terms of sketchbooks. If I want to write something like I am doing now I prefer to capture text in a word document on a computer.

Then I went out for the morning stroll. I was thinking about the chapter I read that focused on the painters Cimabue and Giotto and their use of drawing on paper and sketchbooks from nature and the fact that the Fabriano paper mills had been recently started and Florence being only 200 kilometers away was an early recipient of this relatively new technology to Italy. Hence, the availability of paper opened the way for Cimabue and Giotto to make significant innovations in painting and presaged the renaissance.

While thinking about this I wondered about some of the black sketchbook I have around here that I might normally use for asemic writing and was thinking I should do more studies from nature myself especially related to visual music related works I do on occasion and so I thought what would be the right word – like asemic writing – be for this other body of work and so I came up with Asonic Writing (or drawing) meant as musical ideas but not with the intent of writing music but rather of making music scores that are strictly visual and not intended to be performed sonically. The idea is how to move the eye around in a musical way using principles of musical composition. Also, not with the idea of attempting to render existing music as a visual object as many artists have attempted since early on as a proposal for subject matter for abstract art. That is too slavish and I haven’t yet seen anything very convincing.

So there you go Asonic Writing. New invention.