Category: travel

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Guanajuato / Cervantino from a logophile’s perspective

We’ve just returned from a wonderful week and a half in Guanajuato, Mexico. A World Heritage Site, Guanajuato annually hosts the Cervantino festival, which celebrates art and culture. This year was the 45th festival. Maybe I’ll post more about the festival later, but today I’m focusing on the lettering I saw in  Guanajuato. (As always, click on an image for a larger version.)

I enjoyed the graphics that were created for the festival this year.  Here are two examples, but there were many variations. The theme of the festival this year: Revolution. The country theme: France.

We visited the childhood home of Diego Rivera; despite the fact that he left there at age 6, it’s been converted into a museum. An interesting pointed pen variation headed up the sign on the wall.

More interesting, was Rivera’s version of the bird flourish. I’m kind of kidding. Not about it being interesting, but it did remind me of the tons of flourished birds that have come of the hands of master penmen (and penwomen) over the past 150 years.

Guanajuato is a walking city, and boy did we walk. My FitBit registered at least 10,000 steps each day we were there, with a top reading of 17,555 steps.

We didn’t walk up to the Pipila — we took the 47°-grade funicular — but I took this photo of the lettering at the foot of the Pipila. It’s not the Trajan column, but here I was, totally ignoring the huge statue towering above the lettering to concentrate on the lettering below. Typical calligrapher.

This carved sign in one of the plazas commemorates the first Cervantino festival in 1972. Some of the letters remind me of David Jones lettering, especially the S. Here are two details that illustrate what I mean:

 

 

 

 

Another day, we went to Presa de Olla, a nice neighborhood above the city topped by a park. This tiled sign reminded me a bit of Gemma Black’s open versals and her Art Deco-rative  designs. (I do recognize that this sign is totally inferior to Gemma’s work, of course).

Speaking of inferior, this cheerful sign was painted on a restaurant wall in San Miguel de Allende, which is an hour’s bus ride from Guanajuato. I recorded this sign as a cautionary tale for beginning students who tend towards that 0° pen angle. Contrary to what you might think, those wheat stalks are not coming out of the big soup pot, but are painted on the wall behind it.

We attended a lot of music concerts, some dramatic performances, walked the streets with an estudiantina and about 150 Mexican tourists, and much, much more. It was a good trip.

 

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What a summer

This summer, the lyrics to the Johnny Cash song, “I’ve Been Everywhere” are apropros. My version:

I’ve been to:
Cuba, Minnesota, Ogden, Chicago, 
New York, Miami, Asheville, Charlo,
Yellowstone, Montreat, Caribou-Targhee,
Ft. Lauderdale, Quinn’s Hot Spring, Trinidad, and golly gee,
I’m a … traveler.

I’ll start with the last – no, the penultimate – place we’ve been: New York City. While husband and son were at a Yankees game, I visited some of my favorite place to see art in the city.
From the Upper West Side, I walked across Central Park to get to the Grolier Club on 60th. It was a beautiful way to start the day.  I was to log 20,000+ steps visiting seeing art that day.

The highlight: “The Calligraphy Revival – 1906-2016” on exhibit at the Grolier Club. Wow! One room, nearly every major calligrapher beginning with Edward Johnston, one piece per calligrapher, nearly all of the artwork from the the collection of Jerry Kelly, the curator. Wow! I’m getting the catalog, which is available from John Neal Bookseller and Oak Knoll Books. At $45, it’s not cheap, but … wow! There are pieces you won’t see anywhere else.

Then I walked up Park Avenue to The Frick, where I discovered that The Frick, The Morgan, and Neue Galerie have now collaborated to offer the Connoisseur Pass, which gives you admission to all three places for roughly the price of two. (I didn’t make it to the Neue Galerie this time, but the pass saved me $2 anyway.) I promptly sat down in the lovely courtyard for a rest. Like The Morgan and Neue Galerie, this building was originally a private home and the owner’s collection formed the basis for the museum’s holdings.

I had planned to walk on up to the Met, but I thought I might be able to persuade my husband to visit there the next day. (I was right.) So instead I took the subway down to The Morgan, perhaps my favorite place to see art.  Their exhibits are always to interesting to us manuscript people, and it’s not overwhelming.  The most interesting thing I saw there that day: drawing of “Poussin, Claude, and French Drawing in the Classical Age“. The images of the exhibit at The Morgan website can’t begin to do them justice.

It was a lovely day in New York City.

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Cambodia – part 1

At the end of our one-day tour of Bangkok, we took a flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia. The next three days were one wat after another. We learned a lot about architecture of the Khmer Empire that flourished from the 8th to 15th century.

Row of god statues on the left flank of the entrance bridge of Angkor Thom.
Row of demon statues on the left flank of the entrance bridge of Angkor Thom.

In Khmer architecture, the science and religion of water were closely inter-twined. On the one hand, the size and proportion of the surrounding artificial waterways played a scientific role in the durability of these temples (called “wats”). On the other hand, the theology described the bridges over these waterways as bridges from the secular universe to the sacred temple residing in heaven. Sacred geometry comes into play, with the spatial dimensions paralleling the proportions of the four ages (yuga) of the Hindu canon. The bridge is flanked by rows of gods on the left and demons on the right. You can  just see one of the five entry towers at the end of the bridge.

One day went to Kulen Mountain and climbed the steps to see the reclining Buddha and have our fortune told by a monk who consulted the Life of Buddha for our readings. Phnom Kulen has been a candidate to be a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1992. I was interested to read recent controversy about that.

That evening we went to a dinner show of Cambodian traditional dance. The light was low, but here’s a taste of what it was like:

More next time.

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Thailand – day 1

Side view of Wat Pho, overlooking Bangkok city.

We’ve just returned from a long trip to Cambodia and Thailand. It was fast-paced, interesting experience.

Here are the top 5 reasons that I’m happy to be back:

  1. It’s no longer necessary to convert from baht to dollars in my head (divide by 3, then by 10, then add a little back). And the bills and coins are familiar and easily recognizable.
  2. I can read the signs here.
  3. I am so over those clothes I was able to pack in my carry-on luggage.
  4. I can brush my teeth with water straight from the tap!
    and last, but not least,
  5. No leeches here in Montana!

My next few posts will be about our trip, but not to worry: I’ll be posting about lettering I saw there as well as the sights. In some ways, not being able to read the language made it even more interesting to look at the letter forms there. I asked about the different styles of lettering, but I wasn’t able to get a definitive answer about what I was seeing. So I’ll be posting my own speculations with photos of the lettering styles.

When we left Bangkok at 6 am on Tuesday, it was 90°F and about 100% humidity. When we arrived in Bozeman at 1 pm, it was 0°F. What a difference 10 time zones and 32 degrees of latitude makes!

Breakfast at Ariyosam Villa in Bangkok.

We arrived only a month and a day after their beloved king had died. At the royal palace, long lines of mourners waited to pay their respects to the king. Toward the end of our visit, firecrackers reminded us that the crown prince had become the new king that afternoon.
We spent the first night and day in Bangkok, staying at Ariyosam Villa, an oasis of a hotel in the center of Bangkok. Breakfast was served on the patio by the pools, and it was both beautiful and delicious. Passionfruit (top left), pineapple, and papaya to start. All of the fruit — we could eat anything without the skin — was delicious.

A stupa at Wat Pho.
The entrance to Wat Pho.

We began a full-day tour of Bangkok at Wat Pho, a huge temple complex in the middle of Bangkok, next to the palace. Shown at right is the entrance to the main building.

The architecture of both Wat Pho and the Royal Palace was interesting and unfamiliar to me. Everything was embellished and gilded, and the grounds contain monks’ living quarters as well as a number of chedis, or stupas — Buddhist shrines.

We got Thai massages at the Wat Pho Thai Traditional Medical and Massage School, right on the grounds of the complext. That 30-minute massage was the best massage I got the entire trip. Heavenly! The 18th-century inscriptions on the walls nearby were commissioned by King Rama III to preserve and make public both religious and secular knowledge. The 1,431 stone inscriptions were named a UNESCO Memory of the World site in 2011.

A section of the Epigraphic Archives of Wat Pho.
Statues at the Marco Polo Gate to Wat Pho.

These statues were a surprise. I was told that they were Chinese statues, and other pairs did look Chinese. Later, I read that they were included as ballast on the Chinese ships. But these evidently captured what Europeans looked like to the Chinese. They look to me like they belong at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

We finished up the day with a canal trip on a longtail boat. The canals were quite crowded (as was all of Bangkok — over 6 million people!).

 

As we waited for the drawbridge, I snapped this photo of our boat’s name, ting to imagine which elements were essential to the letters and which were styling. I think of this style as “blackletter” Thai.