Ouroboros, Tetramorph, Polycephalos

Back when I was at the Getty in LA a couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Symbols and Allegories in Art by Matilde Battistini.

I grew up being taken to the Prado in Madrid which houses a fine collection of Renaissance Flemish and Italian art and managed to pick up along the way a lot of the Christian iconography, but this book is a gem.

What today must be studied, memorized, and recognized with a definite “aha!” when spotted in a painting was taken for granted. Just as lot of the allusions in Shakespeare would have been caught by even the hoi polloi at the time. Now, they’re the sign of an elite education and culture.

It’s a bridge, though, between this world and that, and I’m looking forward to reading more. And looking.

Fifty Years of Pigments

My cousin Gainor is having a 50-year retrospective show of her work at the Horizon Line Gallery in Tampa starting on September 23. Well done, Gainor. Thanks for being a luminous presence in my life. (Click here to see a painting by Gainor that hangs in our living room…)

More Lettering Fun

A package containing two wonderful books arrived today from John Neal Bookseller. The first is Logo Font & Lettering Bible by Leslie Cabarga, something I wonder how I’ve lived without this past year. The second is the book of a show we saw in San Francisco in 2001, Calligraphic Type Design in the Digital Age (an exhibition in honor of the contributions of Hermann and Gudrunn Zapf).

Both these books risk derailing me from myriad other tasks, pleasant and otherwise, over the next few days…

Gadding Round the Getty

I’m in Los Angeles for the weekend, seeing a dear friend. We hit the book arts show at the Getty today. It was fun to see recent Russian homages to early Soviet book arts, El Lissitsky’s One Only Kid, and a fabulous silk spool construction. A favorite was a single page printed 184 times, torn at a slightly further away spot each time, so the book formed a triangular wedge and the page was just legible.

Christina is a print artist of extraordinary talent and we have spent much of the day in breathless conversations about the possible. (And dreaming about unlimited studio space.)

Calligraphy Into Font II

I’m now well underway with the project of turning my foundational hand into a font. It’s extremely slow work, of course, though now that I’m getting the workflow down, things will move ahead more quickly. At right are the first four glyphs I’m happy with. Ninety-five more to go after that, and then comes setting the character widths, kerning, and finally hinting!

Fun Package in the Mail

A wonderful thing! A package arrived from Japan today with many pens, none of which you can get here. There are also two Pentel waterbrushes (at least I think that’s what they are; my Japanese isn’t so hot).

Thanks, Butuki. I’ll post a sketch the minute I get to it. (By the way: how exactly do you make a riceball?)

I returned from my Hebrew class tonight with the sense of triumph appropriate to having composed my first sentence.

Calligraphy Into Font

Perhaps it’s a midsummer thing but once again I’m interested in the project of turning our calligraphy hands into fonts. Regardless of how these work as typefaces, having a digital representation of a calligraphy hand will be extremely useful in solving calligraphic layout and design problems. Luckily, there’s a good freeware font design program to get started with this task—namely FontForge.

Blood, Gore, and Fegato

My class in uncial is winding down. It almost didn’t finish at all, but some quick footwork on the part of the teachers found us an alternative site for our class when the old one blew up (or rather was disconnected by a disgruntled computer person).

Uncial has many connotations. It’s invariably the script used around witchcraft, good or bad, on television or in shop windows. Given that the Irish variant was used for centuries (and still is) in Ireland, it often gives a Celtic flavor to whatever you’re writing. I’m not Irish though my accent sometimes leads people to think I might be—and I do have a kind of horror of piggy-backing on someone else’s culture.

I was going to do a quote from Beowulf, but I’d want to do it in the Old English as well as the translation, and that seemed cumbersome. Plus it’s translated by Famous Seamus, see horror in paragraph #2 above.

So instead I have been immersing myself in a piece written by Elck of the late lamented Vernacular Body. It concerns the liver, which seems an admirable subject for a hand as old and venerable and earthy and be-wormed as uncial. Here’s an excerpt:

4. Livered.

A bloody formless mass sitting in the inner dark. Brooding, suppurating, sweating like an injured animal. Prometheus on the Caucasus, delivered. Fava beans, Chianti.

(We have not eaten fava beans tonight but we did have lentils cooked in the solar cooker with tomatoes and capers, and cracked open a bottle of Fat Llama Chilean Cab, which is a lot chewier than Chianti. A la tienne, Elck.)

Reptile Refuge

We went to the Sacramento Zoo today to take a class on drawing animals. Our instructor was Robert Dvorak, who taught the travel sketching course we took here in April. The Sacramento Zoo is a good size for this exercise, it being easy to do the rounds in a half-day. We started at the flamingos, visited the hornbills and griffon vulture, and ended up at the giraffes (a challenge to get all angles and legs on the page, particularly when they move) before breaking for lunch.

By that time I was in my rhythm. We continued on to the zebras, bongo-bongos, orangutans, and chimpanzees. We moved on to the big cats, but they were all in their shelters from the heat. We got the hint and proceeded to take refuge in the coolness of the Reptile House. A wise move, since it got to be 104° F today in Sacramento. The reptiles are fun to draw. They like holding interesting poses, the lizards have great scales, fringes, and eyes, and you can get up close to them. (None of them came through the glass, despite it being Harry Potter day.) At right is a drawing I did of a flat-tailed tortoise from Madagascar, done with a non-waterproof roller ball pen and light wash.

Emerging from the Deep

Advice to designers, editors, dissertation writers, and anyone who’s contemplating a big desktop publishing job in the future, imminent or otherwise:

a) make copious, redundantly copious, stupidly copious, backups. So when you accidentally overwrite a file of fifty pages with only the first page, all you have to do is go to the last backup and enter (tediously, admittedly) all the latest iteration of edits, not retype the whole thing. I know there are people who know how to retrieve supposedly lost file copies but they aren’t around at six in the morning or nine at night on the weekend. And I’m not one of those people anyway.

b) never, ever make global changes of anything when you’re tired. This is the way to end up with sentences that start like this: “In generallifornia…”

c) resize all your fifty gigantic maps BEFORE you need to go to Kinko’s on Friday night and it’s due on Tuesday after a holiday weekend with a skeleton staff of people who will be working at three in the morning with more or less of a clue.

d) don’t eat that extra scoop of ice cream before going to bed. Do you really need your heart racing that fast?

e) decide on a style and STICK to it. The Central Valley/Bay-Delta controversy has changed so many times over the last week I’m still not sure where we are with it, but I think it’s changing anyway, to Central Valley and Bay-Delta, hyphen not endash. But this will have to be in the next draft. As it went to press it was Central Valley and Bay-Delta (endash).

f) When compiling styles for multiple documents be sure, always, to set them in the master document, not in satellites. I have a style called Appendix Chapter Title, appchtitle, appcht, and probably one other one. They all do more or less the same thing. More or less. The less part is going to harrass me for days.

During this past week I’ve hardly even read email, let alone read blogs. I hope to rectify this now.

I did hear from my sister about the legalization of gay marriage in Spain: GO SPAIN. Thirty years ago, when we lived there, a mere suspicion that someone was gay or lesbian was enough to land them in jail. Reading through the Spanish press subsequently the general tone seemed to be this: and you have a problem with this why, exactly?