One of my favourite art work is the Victorian Blood Books. Despite John Bingley Garland's outstanding works which is now kept in musemums - he had never considered himself an artist and is self taught. Because of him, he had inspired us to do a series of Hard Jounral Books. 

John Bingley Garland was a prosperous English merchant, politician, public servant, and collage artist. He had put together a manuscript of forty-five “Blood Collages” often referred to as the ‘Victorian Blood Book’. All likely executed in the 1850s, 62 years before the medium of collage was officially “invented” by Picasso or Braque.

Material used are collages of engravings, gold paper with gouache, and gold paint with extensive inscriptions in pen and ink on buff backing paper. Its decoupage was assembled from several hundred engravings, many taken from books of etchings by William Blake, as well as other illustrations from early nineteenth-century books. He would meticulously cut and assemble hundreds of prints as source material to create astonishing, visionary collages. 

The works include extensive inscriptions of religious texts, gold and blue paper, painted gouache, and his signature drops of blood made with diluted red ink. It also contains many symbols bleeding doves and crosses, red ankhs (Egyptian hieroglyph symbolizing life), serpents, skulls, stars, eggs—mixed with Christian and pagan imagery, architecture and ruins, sculpture, and archaeological fragments. These mysterious and spiritual works are in our collection.

The book’s reputation, however, rests on a decorative detail that overwhelms: To each page, Garland added languid, crimson drops in red India ink, hanging from the cut-out images like pendalogues from a chandelier.

Blood drips from platters of grapes and tree boughs, statuaries and skeletons. Crosses seep, a cheetah drools, angels dangle bloody sashes. A bouquet of white chrysanthemums is spritzed.

To be clear, Garland’s blood is not that of surgery or crime or menses, but of religious iconography. He obviously intended the blood to represent Christ’s own. 

And yet the final work suggests that the properties of actual blood tugged the artist’s shirtsleeves, pulling him away from the symbol and towards its source. It’s as if God gave Garland permission to fetishize hemorrhage.

The Blood Book isn’t the only evidence of this fixation. Garland also made several single-page collages, now dispersed in various museums. In these, the imagery is more densely layered and the compositions more clamorous than those in the Blood Book, but the trademark drips remain.