Category: something else

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Another go at the Anais Nin letter to Henry Miller

Same quote, same basic layout as last week: all-over texture, no guidelines, fairly large lettering (for me, at least) … except that I used a Speedball Flicker B5 nib, and included a little bit of watercolor painting. Once time I picked up the #3 Mitchell nib (from last week) by accident, and wrote one word before I realized my mistake. Since the word was “alone” it seem appropriate to leave it … um … alone. (Sorry.)

Written out April 24 with a German version of the Speedball B nib and travel box of Winsor & Newton watercolors.
Written out April 22 & 24 with a Speedball Flicker B5 nib and travel box of Winsor & Newton watercolors.
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At the MONA in Tasmania

On a recent trip to Australia, I visited the best ever museum: the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), up the river from Hobart, Tasmania. What a ride! And I’m not talking about the ferry we took from Hobart’s Sullivan Cove to the MONA — although that was a great way to start the journey.

Here are a couple of photos of one of my favorite installations, entitled “”.

Untitled installation at the MONA
Untitled installation at the MONA

 

A closer look at the untitled installation
A closer look at the untitled installation

I was aware of so many simultaneous reactions to this room full of blank white books — undergoing a kind of vertigo of meaning while critiquing a loose headband; contemplating the horror of a zombie library while wondering at the artist’s control in not making a mark in any of the books or shelves or tables; imagining the impact of one red dot while wondering at the impulse to find meaning even in this blank room; acknowledging the urge to make a mark somewhere while mulling over various criticisms of the blank book made within the artist book community; remembering a cartoon from my childhood in which all the musical notes came loose from the staves and fell off the page; thinking about invisible ink, the perils of magnetic media …

And that was just one work of art on the three subterranean floors of the MONA. We stayed all afternoon and didn’t see everything — not even close.

Here were some of the highlights for me:

  • “Kryptos” by Brigita Ozolins— winding corridors upon whose walls were a binary code translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, with ancient cuneiform artifacts  set into the walls at intervals;
  • “Pulse” by Rafael Lozano Hemmer — a row of incandescent bulbs (imported from China because the are illegal to buy in Australia), each one blinking at the heart rate of a visitor who stepped up to the monitor and recorded his or her pulse — and then you turn the corner into a room full of the bulbs;
  • “When My Heart Stops Beating” by Patrick Hall — open each of the floor-to-ceiling drawers to read text and hear a recorded “I love you”; it’s indescribable, you just have to be there, but here’s an article about it;
  • A collection of Henry Darger‘s drawings

I could go on. And have, much to the boredom of my friends.

And when it all got to be too much, a bounce on the trampoline outside was the perfect break.

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Guidelines

There are all kinds of ways to make guidelines for calligraphy. Here are some of the ways I do it:

  1. A Word document. This downloadable Word document prints landscape on a letter-size sheet of paper − x-height of 10 points (a little larger than 1/8″) with a leading of 36 points (about 7/8″) and 35º slant lines. The slant lines are in the header/footer area.
  2. An InDesign document, which provides more opportunity fine-tuned guidelines. Here is a downloadable PDF from an InDesign document which has many layers of guidelines − slant lines and regular − that I can turn on and off for a variety of combinations. I could have multiple columns, or a shape that breaks up the text, or other complications that don’t work so well in Word.
  3. I like manually inked guidelines too, especially for large pieces. I use a lining guide, T-square and slantboard for these. John Neal provides instructions for using a lining guide here.

If you don’t want to make your own, you can generate some online at several websites:

I used to use Calli-Graphic, a computer app, but it seems to be defunct.