Yesterday I returned from The Passionate Pen in Sonoma County, California. It was a wonderful week seeing old friends and new work, experimenting with new ideas, tools and materials. I was surprised to find myself working with a pointed brush most of the week. I’ll post more about the conference in the days to come, but today I’ll share the page I did in the Oakland airport and on the plane to Salt Lake City. I learned more about “form themes” in Ewan Clayton’s four-day workshop, especially during the study of Hans-Joachim Burgert’s work. On this page, my form theme includes condensed capitals, line leading that is smaller than the height of the letters, and three rogue letters that are not condensed. The choice of three letters changes in each of the three blocks. It was a good way to spend the hours in the airport coming down from the conference.
Bic 0.5mm #2 mechanical pencil on a Strathmore 400 Drawing (heavier weight) sheet about 9×12.
The J. Paul Getty Museum has made available high-resolution images of Georg Bocskay’s Mira calligraphiae monumenta online here. Lettered in the mid-1500s by Georg Bocskay, Joris Hoefnagel added the illuminations about 30 years later. What an wonderful addition to the WWW’s digital calligraphy resources.
Richard Feynman quotation about doubt, done with ruling pen & walnut ink, pencil
A couple of weeks ago I attended an inspiring workshop taught by Peter Thornton in Missoula. If I take enough workshops with Peter, perhaps eventually most of what he teaches will actually sink in. It’s all so valuable, and seeing his manuscript books was especially inspiring. This weekend I digested a little more of his teaching about layout, especially as it relates to the Fibonacci series.
Here’s a piece I did in the workshop. The abstract word is “Chaos”. I meant to write this quote on one of the of the sheets that had the word “Doubt” on it, but I guess chaos often relates to doubt. I have yet to attribute the quotation, which belongs to Richard Feynman. Another layout decision, you know. The entire quotation reads:
“We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.”
Pointed pen practice – Leonardt Principality nib, McCaffery Penman’s Ink and Moon Palace sumi ink on Strathrmore Drawing 400
It’s been so hot that I’ve been working in the dining room on the main floor of the house. My studio over the garage is an oven this summer, especially in the afternoons. For the past couple of days I’ve been addressing wedding invitations, which is good from a “venue” standpoint: the tools and materials needed are finite and portable.
Pointed pen is so different from broad-edge pen lettering, that when I switch from one to the other that I must practice to get back in the groove. Shown above are two of the three pages done to prepare for job. For the first page (not shown) I lettered in my default pointed pen script. Because the invitation was printed in Bickham Script, on these two pages I developed a script style that incorporates some of the characteristics of Bickham.
Sample from Bickham Script Pro font
A few Bickahm characteristics I chose to incorporate in my script:
small x-height
50º slant (or more)
weight on the heavy side
“y” descender with no loop but an exit stroke on the right
“o” exit stroke beginning from the middle right side of the oval
“f” with a lower loop as well as an upper loop
entrances to letters such as i, j, m, n, and especially u, w, y are more pointed than curved, allowing for tighter letter spacing
I’m always aiming for a balance between contrasting and complementing the printed invitations. Too little contrast, and it looks like inept printing. Too much contrast, and there is no connection between the addressed envelope and what’s inside.
Today was a big day in US public life, for at least three reasons. First, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Health Care Act in King v. Burwell. Second, it also upheld the right to same-sex marriage in all 50 states. And third, President Obama eulogized Reverend Pinckney, who was gunned down in his church in South Carolina last week.
Today’s daily lettering was a meditation on this inspiring eulogy. I could call it an exercise in improvisational layout, or practicing pencil Roman capitals and pressurizing down strokes. But I often forgot these technicalities while absorbing the text.
June 12 and 13 daily lettering – pages 18-19June 15 daily lettering – page 20
All that bicycling in Crete took its toll on my back, but I’ve been soldiering on – most days – on the homework for Peter Thornton’s workshop in Missoula this coming weekend.
Last Friday, page 18: Experimenting with changes in orientation, size, spontaneous layout. (I had to do something about that the horrendously large space in the O, which could have been fixed by wider letter spacing or a narrower O … but wasn’t.) Page 19, done on Friday and Saturday, was an attempt to keep the three main width groups of Romans but condense them all by about 25%. Not a success, except that I learned that it would probably be better to move toward a more consistent letter width at that level of compression. None of the following work: condensation, condensing, condensement.
Yesterday, page 20: I dispensed with guidelines and line leading, experimenting with variations in orientation and size, and trying to get the spaces to “talk” to one another.
I had the honor of making this ketubah for Aaron and his bride Noy. An honor and a pleasure, as I’ve known Aaron since about the time he entered kindergarten. It was a beautiful evening in the foothills of the Judean Mountains.
Italic through the years – 1984 through the present
Last month I was commissioned to write out the Kipling poem “If”. Since 1983 I believe I’ve written this poem out at least once every other year. I don’t always keep an image of the poem, but I do have 3 images here, from 2002, 2007 and 2015. (You can click on the image for a closer look.) I usually do the poem in italic, for several reasons. First, it is very long and so I choose something that flows easily from the pen. Second, it is very long and yet people do want to have it framed; so the lettering must be fairly small. Third, even though, and especially because, it is very long, people want maximum legibility. Fourth, a compressed hand is better than a wider hand because two columns of two verses each makes for a good standard frame proportion. Fifth, even though I think a book hand would be a good choice of lettering style, most people don’t think of book hand as “calligraphy”. {sigh}
That 1984 hand running up the left side looks pretty damn good for someone who had been lettering for less than 2 years. The 2002 version of the first verse looks a lot less attractive. The lettering was much smaller, the paper more difficult for me at the time, the slant was clearly problematic, and I think the stress of getting all that text down on a page with consistency and without errors was still a challenge. In 2007, I was in art school and not doing much lettering, and it shows. In the 2015 version, I spent a good deal of time trying out inks on the paper (see here), and still … my consistency could be improved.
Looking at this montage of lettering from 1984-2015, it’s not particularly clear that I’ve progressed, even though I’ve got to think I’ve learned something in the intervening years. I’m reminded of the a quotation (which I can’t find now) that goes something like: “What is learned after the age of 40 can’t be communicated.” Truth or comforting fiction?
Laboring onward, I got a little off track about line 7 of page 14, but I ended up at the bottom of page 15 back at just monoline Roman capitals with a little pressure and release. I’m ready to break out of the lines soon. Maybe.
These letters are slowly seeping into my kinetic memory. Spacing is still problematic (story of my life), and 3 o’clock to 6 o’clock on O, Q, C, G, D is just not happening with any regularity at all. That area of the circle is like trying to scratch the itch between my shoulder blades: I can get there, but not natural and it’s not elegant.
