(This post was inspired by a discussion on Typophile. The wide-ranging and brilliant exchange of views between typographers and calligraphic artists such as Michael Clark, Nick Shinn, Ieuan Rees and John Hudson got me thinking about the philosophical underpinnings of the letter arts and how my own work evolved from traditional calligraphy to a hybrid form of lettering design.)
When I was in art school my mentor, Charles Stokes, used to hover and harangue with zen aphorisms, one of which translated as this: "If you are painting with your chin on your hand and your elbow on the table you might as well be asleep. Wake up!" Charles came from the mark-making school of art, strongly influenced by Mark Toby and Morris Graves. He balanced withering criticism that struck with the sharpness of a keisaku with wide-open joy and mystic understanding. He inspired his students with a certainty that art was far more than making pictures: you were embarking on a Way, a Path, a Calling, and everything you did in art and life should reflect this.
No one at art school could understand when I began to practice traditional calligraphy. It seemed quaint and embarrassing, and completely counter to the artistic climate of the time which was dominated by abstract expressionism. Art should be asymmetric, wild, original. Hadn't the alphabet already been done? Yet the cloisters, the promise of slant morning light across ancient stone, of feathers cured in hot sand and ink smelling of gall called to me. In calligraphy I found a sense of apprenticeship that anchored me in history. Unlike the blank unstructured canvas, the calligrapher's practice sheet had rules beneath it. It would shortly fill with ordered rows of letters marching to their logical destinations: the word, the sentence, the paragraph, the page. Mindful of Charles' exhortations, I could see that to do calligraphy I had to have both hands engaged, one carefully resting on the paper, one holding the pen, and my mind in a state of active anticipation.
As I stumbled through the raw and humbling mechanics of learning to load a nib and get ink to flow and shape a letter I saw that every stroke was the record of a state of mind. Fear, confidence, wondering, distraction, focus, all indelibly stained the page. Sometimes the distance from the top of a stroke to bottom seemed like skating down a sheet of ice with unforgiving snowdrifts on all sides, and sometimes it was like carving the arches of the cloisters. The pen's edge became a chisel which, if held at the proper angle, made a perfect counter space for n, and m and u. I was making letters, but I was engaging space.
As I became more adept I began to see more nuance. My goal was the perfect letter living on the page. But the stroke begins outside the margins, off the page, in motion and in stillness counterbalanced -- and then it lands. It begins with a rational and practiced blueprint for construction, but it is affected by emotional weather, by music, by interruptions. And it is guided also by visualization, not of the letter as inert thing, but as a sequence of moves. When I am "on" I can feel the invitation of the paper, the sensual particularity of its surface, rough or smooth, and see the ink glistening even before I have picked up my pen. It is a state of "what if" easily interrupted by the dread "what then?" But at its best every mistake becomes a point of improvisation, very much like playing music.
THE LIMITS OF CALLIGRAPHY
Solutions that arrive kinesthetically and directly out of the inherent engineering of the tool have a natural balance of positive and negative shapes created without fear of aesthetic incorrectness. They land on the page with a sureness of gravity, an understanding of their own boundaries, and an affection for the community of letters coming before and after. But there is a hazard. In some sense they always look the same. One can tell exactly how they are made.
In studying the work of master calligraphers it is always the mark that I cannot diagnose that catches my eye. For instance: Herman Zapf. I nearly killed myself trying to do curving ascenders like his thinking they were made in one stroke, until I discovered by watching a film of him in action that each seemingly single stroke was made up of a series of hesitations, overlaps and deft "pulls." And it is dauntingly difficult. It is magic. There is a complexity in this kind of work that holds my attention for a long time. I think it is because it marries two minds: the visual result looks like it originates in gesture, but the method is complex engineering. The stroke is made slowly, self-consciously, yet appears completely "natural."