Donald Jackson had a special hand in producing the "Book of Psalms." It's an artistic hand which used a quill and flowing elliptic motions to produce an illuminated manuscript version of the biblical text.
The "Book of Psalms," 150 songs traditionally ascribed to King David, is the third volume to be completed of the Saint John's Bible.
Psalms marks "the midpoint of this great endeavor," said Benedictine Brother Dietrich Reinhart, president of St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., which commissioned the project in 1998. The illuminated Bible is scheduled to be completed by 2007.
Jackson is artistic director of the Saint John's Bible and a former longtime scribe to Queen Elizabeth's Crown Office at the House of Lords in London. In the field of calligraphy and illumination, Jackson is also regarded as royalty.
Calligraphy is beautiful handwriting. Illumination is decorating a page with gold, silver, copper, platinum and brilliant colors, or with elaborate designs or miniature pictures.
"As the page turns, what is drawn there captures light, delighting the eye," Jackson said. "That's what it means to illuminate."
Jackson is not illuminating and doing calligraphy for all 1,150 or so calfskin pages of the seven volumes. A team of 14 calligraphers and artists -- including illuminator Thomas Ingmire of San Francisco -- is creating this Bible, directed by Jackson from his scriptorium in Monmouth, Wales. It will be the first handwritten and illuminated Bible of this scope since the early 1500s. Each page measures 16 by 24 inches.
Jackson said he created a font with a lighter weight script for the "Book of Psalms" which befits their more poetic and melodic nature compared to the text of the other completed volumes: "Gospels and Acts of the Apostles" and the "Pentateuch," the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures.
The content of the "Book of Psalms" is not prose, "not even poetry. This is song," Jackson said as he demonstrated calligraphy at a media briefing in Minneapolis this spring by making a huge blue cursive "R" on an easel, his arm arcing elliptically like a blade on an eccentric windmill.
"The psalms are so powerful," he said. "In them there is anguish, fear, love, joy, regret -- 'Oh, I wish, I wish I hadn't done that!' -- that type of thing. Yet, they are contained within the page. It is passion contained."
Jackson, however, finds it difficult to contain his fervor for his artistry, a passion fashioned when his aunt, to keep her precocious young nephew occupied, propped him at a table with a pen and bottle of red ink.
"I was just a little kid, but I still can feel the joy of dribbling that red wet stuff all over the page," said Jackson, 66.
"It's all about expressing energy and emotion within a structure. Every little letter comes from energy generated from the whole body, just like every note from a violin comes from energy from a violinist's body," he said as another parabolic pen-stroked trail of blue flourished on his easel.
The bulk of the work of the Saint John's Bible, using the text of the New Revised Standard Version, requires less flourish and more nourishing one's concentration and attention to textual detail.
"It's not just doing the fancy stuff. That would be like eating candy for breakfast, lunch and supper," he said.
To hint at how handwritten fonts are fashioned, Jackson drew an "o" on the easel, then drew over it successively, producing an "a," "c" and "g."
"Inside that 'o' live an 'a' and 'c' and 'g'," he said. "People are used to type, they're not used to calligraphy. We're not trying to sell beer on a highway billboard here. People are not going to be driving past this Bible at 70 miles per hour."
St. John's plans to make available trade reproductions of each volume of the Saint John's Bible, as well as limited-edition, full-size facsimiles, fine art prints and a CD-ROM computer version for worldwide distribution.
A slide show of the project was presented at the University of Judaism in Bel-Air in June.
"It's magnificent. It's breathtaking," said Janet Weber, a calligraphy and art teacher at Immaculate Heart High School in Los Angeles. The gold and silver in the illuminations flickers and "pops out of the page," she added. The lettering is "gorgeous."
Weber learned calligraphy from Jackson in the 1970s when he served as a visiting instructor at Mount St. Mary's College.
Even then his passion for the intricacies of ink was paramount. Weber recalled a group of calligraphers accompanying Jackson to Chinatown in search of the finest quality ink sticks. Despite language barriers, Jackson strove at length to understand the differences in ink sticks from an elderly Chinese man. The sticks are grounded and mixed with water to produce high caliber ink. Jackson bought many sticks he's used and given to others to try, said Weber.
Pat Topping, another Jackson calligraphy student who worked as a calligrapher for the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, said this of Jackson's talent and commitment: "Anyone can read a recipe and cook something, but it takes a lot of practice to become a chef."
In undertaking a project that has been his lifelong dream, Jackson said he is moved by what he renders artistically. "How can you remain unaffected when you're playing with words like this? You're writing like God with words that are megaphonable, mega-explosive."
The remaining volumes of the Saint John's Bible are "Prophets," scheduled for completion in February 2005; "Wisdom Books and Poetry," by November 2005; "Historical Books," by August 2006; and "Letters and the Book of Revelation," by July 2007.
Ellie Hidalgo contributed to this article.
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