Print Series:
| Marginalia |






The ongoing Marginalia series of large-scale limited edition archival pigment prints begins with rare books and manuscripts on subjects having to do with the history of art, astronomy, physics, religion and other subjects, after which high-resolution scans of selected title and text pages are acquired. In some cases, data derived imagery from spacecraft and orbiting telescopes are also employed. Added texts and/or painterly intervention/commentary to the images refer to marginalia (the timeless practice of writing in book's page margins, such that the page content is amplified), and are drawn from my own writings/visuals and the writings of various individuals in history.









Marginalia (Our Only Heaven), 2023
Text: Stephen Nowlin essay excerpt, Realspace, 2017.
Image: Webb Telescope, spiral galaxy NGC 1300 stellar populations and gas
Data: NASA, ESA, ESO-Chile, ALMA, NAOJ, NRAO, Alyssa Pagan
Archival pigment print, 62 x 74 inches (mounted).


Marginalia text:
NATURE is space from here to over there, the airy in-between through which we pass to arrive at something. It's wandering from the bedroom to find coffee and the morning paper, it's the train station commute to the other end of the line, it's pushing open the door. It's anywhere and everywhere we go, fly, swim, dance, crawl and fall — and what we evade, sit on, step over. We avoid walls and the edges of cliffs. We're skilled experts, dancers in a maze performing the choreography of getting around. We learn to know truth and our trust rises to a belief — no matter what else we may say we believe in, our actions pledge allegiance to our true belief, which is Nature. We worship our corner of it in unceremonious practice every time we start the car, board a jet, ride an elevator, or escape falling down the stairs. By gravity we're stuck to the surface of an orbiting spherical satellite of a hydrogen-fusion star floating in a space vacuum, just as sure as we pour milk on our cereal. Nature is space, our cradle. Our mystery, our evolution, our only heaven.









Among the series, the above scanned manuscript page both left and right is from composer Charles Ives'(1874-1954) The Unanswered Question, double-exposed with a Walt Whitman 1867 poem embracing Ives' cosmic mystery — but which also implied an unfavorable comparison of science to personal transcendent experience (left). On the right, it is answered a hundred years later in a quote by Nobel Prize physicist Richard Feynman, in which he argues that mystery and transcendent sensation await us not only in romanticizing physical matter, but equally in pursuing knowledge of it.


Left: Marginalia (Walt Whitman/Charles Ives), 2021; archival pigment print, limited edition, 47x38in.
Text excerpt: Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer, 1867.
Scan of manuscript score: Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question, ca. 1930-35.

Right: Marginalia (Richard Feynman/Charles Ives#1), 2021; archival pigment print, limited edition, 47x38in.
Text excerpt: Richard Feynman, Feynman Lectures on Physics, 1964.
Scan of manuscript score: Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question, ca. 1930-35.










Marginalia (Richard Feynman/Charles Ives#2), 2021; archival pigment print, limited edition, 47x38in.
Text excerpt: Richard Feynman, Quote from BBC interview, 1981. (detail on right)
Scan of manuscript score: Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question, ca. 1930-35.











Marginalia (Standing on Earth Gazing Skyward), 2021; archival pigment print, limited edition, 28x31 inches.
Text excerpt: Stephen Nowlin, SKY exhibition essay, 2020;
Scan of engraving: Johannes Hevelius, (1611-1687), from Selenographia, 1647.










Marginalia: Of Scepticism and Certainty #1, 2022
Image: scan of chapter heading page from Essays on Several Important
Subjects in Philosophy and Religion
, 1676, by Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680).
Archival pigment print, 66.5 x 42 inches (mounted).







Marginalia (To the Best of Our Knowledge), 2023
Text: Stephen Nowlin essay excerpt, Uncertainty, 2016.
Image: Webb Telescope, stars and galaxies outside the Milky Way
Data: NASA, ESA, CSA, Kristen McQuinn, Zolt G. Levay
Archival pigment print, 62 x 74 inches (mounted).






Marginalia text:
"To the best of our knowledge" is never a phrase frozen in time. It's a bit like asking for ten percent of eternity, but that which cannot be counted also cannot be halved or quartered. A percent of infinity is the same as all of infinity. We can't even say “all,” really, when speaking of something limitless. Likewise, what is knowable keeps expanding, trailed by our best of it, and it summons the realization that there's something else ...still... and then even more — even if all we know is all we think there is to know. Fractal–like, what we know drills down to reveal more places to drill down. It's exhausting. Knowledge is the minuend; to our best of it, the subtrahend. Uncertainty is the difference.











Marginalia: Of Scepticism and Certainty #2, 2022
Image: scan of chapter heading page from Essays on Several Important
Subjects in Philosophy and Religion
, 1676, by Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680).
Archival pigment print, 22.5 x 27.5 inches (framed).








Marginalia (Several Important Subjects), 2023
Image: scan title page Essays on Several Important
Subjects in Philosophy and Religion
, 1676, by Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680).
Archival pigment print, 46 x 32 inches (framed).









stephen at stephennowlin dot com