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This series is based on the traditional hours of prayer, a literal response of medieval piety to the instruction that we are pray constantly. In convents and monasteries, the sisters and brothers would stop whatever they were doing — sleeping, working, studying, playing — at certain defined times to gather in chapel and pray. Each of these paintings is conceived as an open book, showing two facing pages. However, in the place where words might be found in a real book, there are only geometric, rule-based drawings. As in many illustrated manuscripts, and in many of our own lives, the real action is in the margins.

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