Spencerian Weekend

I just got back from a two-day intensive workshop in Spencerian script. This is really the only truly American calligraphic hand, reaching its heyday in 1860 or so. It differs from its copperplate predecessor by having more oval shapes than round, a smaller x-height, some truly quirky capitals, and much less thick-thin variation.

I’ll post my final project tomorrow when I gather my wits. But it was about Feathers of Hope turning four today… The blotch you see on the feather is, well, a blotch, Dr. Ph Martin’s Bleedproof White, to be precise. I’m still learning this. But you get the picture…

Four Years

Today was one of those days where so many things were planned a little triage was called for… picked up some ceanothus and monkey flower at the Arboretum Plant Sale, rushed home, went in to the Farmers’ Market on my bike for the 13th Worldwide Sketchcrawl. I had planned to go to the one in Sacramento but decided to pull a last-minute event together in Davis. It was so last-minute I was the only participant, but that was fine. I sketched for an hour, had lunch with Numenius, bought a new sketchbook, and then went over to the Code Pink demonstration marking the fourth year of the war in Iraq.

There were probably 100 pairs of shoes, each labelled with the name of a civilian killed in Iraq. This baby I drew, for instance: her father has come back from Iraq, is now on the circuit as an Iraq Veteran for Peace. There was a pair of shoes there that could have fit her.

I returned this evening for a candelight vigil, poetry reading, singing. We’ll be doing this for the rest of our lives…

Gill's Flawed Masterpiece

Ben Archer writes in Singapore’s designer magazine that Eric Gill got it wrong in redesigning Johnson’s typeface for the London Underground.

Eric Gill is one of my heroes so it’s hard to hear this kind of thing but having tried to work extensively with Gill Sans for two large projects over the past year, even I can’t argue that the bolder weights are unproblematic.

Archer puts forward other, in his opinion better, redesigns of Johnson’s typeface, many of which have faded into oblivion.

Stephen Coles in Typographica provides a couple of others. One I’d be particularly interested in trying out is Bliss, clean and “humanistic” without some of the quirks of Frutiger.

Ekphrasis

I’ll be co-editing qarrtsiluni with Lori Witzel of Chatoyance for the next couple of months.

The full description of the theme and how to submit is here, but here’s a short version:

This qarrtsiluni theme pairs submissions in poetry, or poetic prose, with a form of visual art. Ideally they need not be by the same person: this is a collaborative experiment. Non-bloggers are particularly encouraged to participate. Find a partner whose work you admire and have at it!

The visual art contributions will be posted in our gallery awaiting writers – check back often over the next two weeks, as we will have more to share.

All work, visual and otherwise, will be reviewed and juried by the editors before publishing. Poems should be no longer than 30 lines; prose pieces should be no longer than 500 words. Image files should be a maximum of 500 pixels in width.

Please take a look, and consider partnering with someone (they can be dead: if you’d like to write a poem about or inspired by Las Meninas, please feel free), or if you’d like to send in a photo or a piece of art you think might lend itself to poetry, send them in!

Sudoku Pencils and Friends

If you’re getting frustrated with trying to solve Sudoku puzzles maybe you need a pencil specially designed for the task. This site Pencil Things sells everything related to the writing implement. Who knew that you could buy plastic caps to protect pencil points?

Clones

When I worked for an architectural firm in Cambridge, Mass, in the late 1980s, a lot of the young architects had studied at Harvard. They had survived the gruelling critiques by the then prima donna, an eccentric Argentine called Jorge Silvetti (“Jess: but it is veddy veddy oggly”) and were coming to terms with churning out HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) systems rather than designing the masterpieces they were probably all capable of but would never have the chance to do, because architecture is highly political and without an in to where the money was, their work was doomed to oblivion. They were affable and seemed resigned to the huge student loans they’d struggle to repay for decades.

They taught me a lot, though, these talented designers, apart from the late 20th century Boston vernacular and how to play softball. (And, incidentally, how to love the Red Sox.) They taught me that you could tell that someone had studied graphic design at RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design, simply by looking at their portfolio. (You can use any typeface as long as it’s Helvetica.) I later came to learn that you could tell any calligrapher who had been active in Portland in the 1980s: styles coalesce regionally around one or two top practitioners.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this: it’s been going on a long time. The eyes of figures in Giotto’s paintings are what they are because of where he was and who he sipped wine with, as much as who taught him how to paint and his own genius. Early Renaissance Sienna brings to mind a certain look. There were the masters and the students, but there’s an identity inherent in the school.

How this is different from a disturbing trend I’m seeing now in book arts is hard to pinpoint. But the way, now, the de rigueur way to make an artist’s book, is this: you take all your pages, you smother them with acrylics (leave no white space visible, on pain of being labelled facile); you then take vintage photographs, which you cut up in “disturbing” ways (hands; feet; eyes) and paste onto your acrylic ratatouille, and then you paste arbitrary newspaper clippings on top of that and other clip art and maybe some rubber stamping and slather some more muddy acrylics on and there you go, you’ve made some art.

Except for this: all of these pieces are identical. They will be found 100 years from now and someone will say “Scrapbooking School, ca. 2006, artist unknown.”

Will someone please explain to me a) how this happened and b) how it’s just a fad that’ll over by next Tuesday, please?

January Drought Over

Our ditch is full of water. Today’s supposed to be rainy and very windy. I’m heading into Sacramento with some friends to go to the Crocker Art Museum. We’ll be sharing the road with about 2 million other people who, deprived of snow during the month of January, need to make up for lost time. Many dollars will be transferred to orthopedic surgeons this weekend…

A trip to the library last night: Danny Gregory’s Creative License was in the new book section! If you’ve never drawn anything past the age of five, or if you have but got discouraged by comments from teachers or peers or parents or siblings, pick up this book and pick up a pencil (or, even better, a pen, the easier to free yourself from the tyranny of the eraser). I promise you, you won’t regret it.

When I sit and sketch or draw — on a curbside, as on Sunday next to a spectacular flowering quince while most of Davis was watching the Superbowl — I get so absorbed I go into a sort of trance. About five people I knew walked or cycled by while I sat there, and each time I looked up at them with a glazed expression, not helped by the fact they were mostly backlit by the sun, apparitions, almost. There is no better therapy for me. The overwhelm of the sumptuous color, the figuring out its complement in order to render shadows (for this coral, turquoise); the sexual pumping of the bees, never sated, plunging themselves again and again into the heart of every blossom; the audible yet still invisible arrival of an Anna’s hummingbird, displacing the bees momentarily from their copulations with flowers, finally peeking at me through twenty spikey stems: bliss. Whether or not the drawing or sketch is any good is almost irrelevant: the act of sitting, slowing down, really looking — it’s probably the closest I get to meditation.

I’ve been finding lots of good sketching and drawing blogs lately. Making a Mark is eye candy for devotees of the colored pencil, and the current collaborative online Van Gogh project Katherine’s involved with is definitely worth a look; Lori over at Chatoyance sketches freely, passionately, capturing wonderful expressions (which, of course, is all of them: when you’re working with people, every piece of them becomes an object of wonder, worthy of attention); I receive Julian’s Postcard from Provence daily; Aussie calligrapher Graham McArthur has a spectacular blog, Eidolon. Trumpetvine Sketchblog features Martha’s incredible instructions on how to eviscerate a Moleskine planner and turn it into exactly the kind of sketchbook you want. (We ran into Martha at the December San Francisco Sketchcrawl and got to see this beautiful creation in action.) Illustration Friday grows each week with more and more participants.

Grab a sketchbook: everything’s fair game. Next worldwide Sketchcrawl: Saturday, March 17. I’ll see you out there. (Or inside: today’s not such a good day for outdoor sketching here in Northern California.)

PS: At right is an almond blossom I drew for Jennifer, whose birthday is today (February 10) and who is dealing with freezing temperatures in Sweden: Happy Birthday, dear Jennifer! The original’s on its way…

Further Adventures in Colored Pencils

My Derwent Coloursofts arrived this week. A beautiful set of 72. I decided to avoid intermediate quantities based on reviews by Bob and Katherine.

I’m quite familiar with how Prismacolors function. There are some super-creamy ones, such as Indigo, Canary Yellow and Tuscan Red, that glisten off the pencil onto the page; others, such as Vermilion Red, seem to have been made with micah and won’t leave a trace on the paper without a lot of effort, without almost scrubbing the color into the paper.

The Coloursofts are, in general, much chalkier than Prismacolors, but are very smooth. Their waxy bloom is slower to grow. The result is a little brighter (see apple on left as opposed to right).

I tried working at the Farmers’ Market this morning. A drawing of this size takes a long time, and people were constantly moving in and out of view, barring the cooperative gentleman in the black vest. It’s better to have an obvious sitter or obvious photograph to work from.

The cats, on the other hand, spend a long time in each position. I was able to do this drawing this morning, in Prismacolor. Black cats are hard to draw and this black was a combination of indigo and tuscan red with a little burnt sienna thrown in. (The warm colors are on top as the cat was close to me, not further away, in which case I’d have done the routine the other way around.)

This sort of discussion seems so arcane when most people around me are talking about megapixels, digital Nikon lenses, and the need to buy external hard drives. I am pondering relative softness of leads and the long, slow, buildup of layers. It’s a different world.

(Note: all the paper used for these drawings was Canson Mi-Teintes, wrong side.)

Aural Calligraphy

In my two tries so far I haven’t made a Morse Code contact yet. One thing that I’m sure will help is practicing my sending — my calls out now probably sound like complete mush. I have a practice key which sounds a tone when I press the key. What I do is hook it up to the computer and record it using a sound editing program. (I use Audacity which is free and open source.) The program is nice to use here because not only can I replay my sending I can also visually look at the letterforms. It becomes quite clear when I am for instance holding the final “dih” too long in the letter C (dah-dih-dah-dih). More than anything the process feels like learning to do calligraphy in sound, in time.

Above is a sketch of my practice key. I have been doing many of these brush pen sketches lately using Pica’s walnut ink.

Sketching Outing

So, so cold last night, but not as bad as it might have been. We met up with some friends at the Farmers’ Market and there were Chicken Tractor, a local bluegrass band, freezing their fingers off. One young aficionado couldn’t take all the excitement.

I’ve been doing some more playing with colored pencil outlines for letters (below and also here).