Pictures, thousands of them drifting across texts

like beached leaves and twigs felled in the rain…

I have befriended glyphs. Exposure since childhood to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the writing system of Japan fascinated me with their picture-like qualities. In 1977, I was learning American Sign Language whose vocabulary dances across space. This inspired me and suddenly I had a clear goal in mind for my own picture language, and the confidence to sustain it decade after decade through growing pains and wins while creating Tapissary.

With some eight thousand glyphic characters (called çelloglyphs), Tapissary owes much to the above-mentioned languages with my own pictures comprising the bulk of the vocabulary. Texts appear drawn, rather than printed. After all, I’m an artist with an interest in everchanging shapes, and have used my language in exhibits, illustrated journals, miniature cities, videos, and practically speaking... shopping lists. The cyclic grammar is a particular feature of Tapissary which reveals the distance between what is real and what is imagined. A cast of thousands of glyphs illustrate our daily journeys great and small, real and imagined.

Recently, after having had the honor of appearing as one of the language creators in Britton Watkin’s 2017 documentary “Conlanging, the Art of Crafting Tongues”, I discovered to my delight, that some people have taken an interest in Tapissary. Because I’m preserving the original Tapissary website, I decided to set up this website to keep you current. My friend Evelyne Okonnek, who is a writer and fellow artist, is helping me organize the content so it will be more user friendly.

Please take a look around. All art related entries, including my clay village called Venticello, fall under the EXHIBITS AND FILMS tab. Language related entries with a 900-word starter dictionary can be found by clicking the LANGUAGE tab. I hope you enjoy the tour, and may the glyphs be with you!

Steven Travis

September 2018

With update August 2022

Updates…

Update August 11, 2022 SIMPLIFIED GRAMMAR

On August 6, I began an exercise in soul searching. I’ve gotten valuable feedback from people over the years that they enjoy the language, but the cyclic grammar stumps them. It seems the time has come to ask the hard question: how necessary is my cyclic system? Can Tapissary function without it? As I’d added my cyclic ideas to the language back in 1987, it feels like a limb of Tapissary. But taking a deep breath, a new solution is underway. There is indeed a way to keep it, but not make it a required part of the language. Since the cycles are rather complex and time consuming to construct, it might be best relegating it to poetry and literature and calling it Literary Tapissary. The Basic Grammar which has always been linked to the cycles, will now instead be paired with a much-simplified application called Spatial Grammar. Currently I’m testing that. The qualities of the Subjective and Objective persist, along with the distance between them. The degree of simplification may be somewhere around 75%. While this is an enormous change, I’ve kept true to the traditional base. The language retains its focus on the ever present balance and interplay of polarity.

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Update December 13, 2023         PAINTING AND STORY

A couple years ago, I finally got back to oil painting after about a 15 year absence from it. Currently, I've been making mostly small oil paintings on linen for various projects. The most recent art and language project was started 4 months ago, and is about half way finished. I wrote a short story called "The Unknown Masons". It will have only 15 pages of text, where only a very short paragraph figures on each page. I should say three short paragraphs, because the first is in Tapissary, the second is in romanized Tapissary so the reader knows how to pronounce it, and the third is in English. So with such a short story, why is it taking so long to make? Fifteen pages of text is also accompanied by 15 oil paintings, and paintings take me a long time to do. My plan is to self publish the book when it's finished. I've never published before, so I can't promise the process will be to my liking. If it's too involved, I might opt instead to bring photos of the pages onto this website in the Stories section. Crossing fingers I get this done by Spring 2024. Wishing everyone a happy holiday season!

Why do real languages change? They must, because the cultures that shape them also change over the centuries. A language is like a mirror, and this is never more obvious than for an invented language since it comes directly out of the mind of its creator. Were someone to ask me, ‘Why do you waste so much time inventing a language, when you can learn a real one that has practical use? (in fact I do speak French and bits of other languages). After all, it has been shaped by millions of people and absorbed all that history along the way’. There is no way I could, or would even want to compare my own work along those lines with such giants. These aspects of real languages fascinate me, and I’m well aware how they exist due to communities and nations, many having millions upon millions of speakers and reaching way back in time. Each user participates in the living of that language, and may be the influences which cause it to evolve. In contrast, I am but one man. Ironically, this gives me another kind of advantage. While I cannot claim that Tapissary was formed by communities, language creators have something a real language can never possess; individuality at its grandest scale of one. The inventor has total control, and no matter what he or she does, it will be a self-portrait of their sense of curiosity, creativity, and their preferences. Personally, I think of Tapissary not so much as a language – though it functions as one – but more of a statement. And like real languages, mine changes with time – while remaining recognizably Tapissary – and it is currently under heavy construction as of this writing in December 2018. This cannot be helped, because as I gain experience in my life, new interests arrive. Some of them are absorbed into the portrait.