Eliana Perez, Salamandra Press, New York, NY

Buckfest Splendor, 2010

Summer, 2006-9

See Eliana Perez Books (.MOV)

Look at some of Eliana Perez's beautiful illustrations at Eliana Perez's website.

Buckfest Splendor, 2010

Buckfast Splendor was found floating down the Hudson River, caught in a small eddy near Kingston. It was sealed in a small box made to look like a miniature Langstroth beehive, and it was entirely covered in beeswax to protect it from the elements. The book, each page also encased in beeswax, was dry and intact. Impermeable.



Allerslev, a beekeeper, painted the pages of a book with layers of beeswax, re-assembling the pages and rebinding the book. Over the course of one and one half years, Perez, whose family also keeps bees, added more layers of wax and lush encaustic and oil painting of insects and plants, integrating birds and beekeepers into the dense landscapes. It is a meditation on beekeeping, and all that bees can teach us about ourselves and the passage of time, the seasons, and lives.



See the movie of Buckfest Splendor being paged here.

Dimensions 9’ x 6’ ; 28 pages
Media: wax, spices, encaustic paint. Buckfast Splendor is a re-constructed trade book originally titled The Splendor of Love.
Calligraphy and font design: Eliana Perez
Poem: The Beekeeper's Daughter, by Sylvia Plath
Binding: Coptic, bound onto covers by Kurt Allerslev

The Beekeeper's Daughter
By Sylvia Plath

A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
You move among the many-breasted hives,
My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.
Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest ---
A fruit that's death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.
In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eyes to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar roses
The queen bee marries the winter of your year.

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Summer, 2006

edition of 20

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