An Almanac of Understanding - Limited Edition of 25 Print

The following was written upon the completion of the work itself, in 2014: I've decided to call this work in ink An Almanac of Understanding after Tolstoy's under-appreciated 'Calendar of Wisdom'.  Unlike other works in 'The Classwork Series', there's a lot of text accompanying the drawing. In fact, there are exactly fifty-two sentences, one for each week of the year, a figure that I, only by chance, stopped at. Each sentence is a quotation either as actually written or only expressing a thought in my diary, in roughly chronological order. The authors include myself, Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, John Wooden, John Baez, Mark Twain, Anthony French, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Leonardo Da Vinci. On the left, I have portrayed the state of my mind, as it was during the last two years of college. The horse at the centre is a symbol of hope and the pillars on the sides represent philosophy, science, music and art. The surrounding snakes are meant to invoke a sense of confusion and helplessness. As we move right, the colour scheme changes to lighter tones, with the man on the left anticipating a brighter future. Until we are sufficiently experienced, it makes good sense that to live a good life, we should live by the truth and look for guidance from those wise people who lived before us. The importance of the existence of a guiding light in our lives cannot be stressed enough. The original not being on sale, high quality giclée prints are available on archival 310 GSM Hahnemühle paper, 1:1; printed using archival inks, these prints will last one a lifetime. Though, really, it does not make much sense in limiting the number of editions of a digital print, as I also indeed wish to control what aspects of quality I can (by way of supervising printing myself, and thereby being excluded from being able to sell open edition on Saatchi), I have decided to limit them to 25. As regards the costing rationale: having attempted selling my prints, previously, at their cost prices themselves, and having left the evaluation of my labour upon my customers to decide- and consequently, not having been able to make ends meet, I have decided, for the first time, to set a fixed profit for myself, in keeping with current practice. Wishing to remain entirely honest however, I must add that it costs me ₹475 per square foot to have the print printed, and ₹100 to have the original scanned, besides which packaging can be accounted for by adding another ₹1000. Entirely unable myself to set a price upon my work, I have chosen what I've seen on Saatchi itself being set for other similarly sized prints (choosing to remain still on the more reasonable side of things). It is for me, really, I must admit, an experiment, this.