WordMarks: A Journal

Letters Mingle Souls

2008-08-31T17:08:00.000-07:00

This summer I attended the Letters Mingle Souls International Calligraphy Conference in Naperville, Illinois. On Tuesday, September 9, 2008 the Fairbank Calligraphy Society will have its Annual General Meeting in Victoria, B.C.

After the AGM I will do a presentation on the conference and also a writing demonstration from the class I took with Brody Neuenschwander. The weeklong class was called "Developing Meaning" and we wrote our own text for a book which can be used as a sourcebook for other calligraphic pieces. This is one of the pages from the book done at the conference. If you are coming to the meeting I hope to show you more!

Contemporary Book Structures Class Work at VISA

2008-08-17T19:50:00.001-07:00

These beautiful flag books were made by the students in the Contemporary Book Structures weekend workshop on August 16 and 17th at Vancouver Island School of Art. Aren't they just fabulous? The students were amazing and the books (from top to bottom) are by Terry, Rachel, Jo Ann, Susan and Kelly. They made two books - the flag book and also the hinged concertina to hold prints or photos or collages....but these flag books are a blast. Thanks to each of you for taking the class - you were an inspiration!

Encounter by Czeslaw Milosz

2008-08-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

Encounter is a beautiful poem by the Nobel prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz:

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Wilno, 1936
By Czeslaw Milosz from "The Collected Poems 1931-1987", 1988

____________________________

After taking Brody Neuenschwander's Developing Meaning class at the Letters Mingle Souls Conference, I wanted to make a new book with text which I really loved. I used the poem Encounter because I felt it spoke to me about the transitory nature of life and how we remember things in the fragments of gesture. (Like how I always remember the people in my family by the smallest thing that happened.) I am still a little mystified by what the poem means but I think this is a good thing - to not fully understand it is one of the reasons why l like to reread it.

I wanted to create a book of sketches, calligraphy and text. The calligraphy on these scans was done with a quill for the large writing and a Speedball for the smaller hand for the poetry. I really liked making these pages and finding that once you start working on this process there are all kinds of new combinations for text and drawing.

Yesterday I covered watercolour paper with gesso and pigments and hope to use the sketchbook as a source for other pieces and continue to use this poem as inspiration.

Letters Mingle Souls

2008-07-31T09:09:00.001-07:00

This picture was taken last week at the Letters Mingle Souls International Calligraphy Conference at Naperville, Illinois - just outside of Chicago. In the middle is Yves Leterme. Georgia and I met Yves last year at the Island Magic Conference here on Vancouver Island. He taught Gestural Writing and Built Up Capitals which we both took and enjoyed so much - we are still trying to hover and swoop over our work! At this year's conference I had a tutorial with Yves and appreciated his comments about my calligraphic pieces.

Last week I took a class at the LMS conference with Brody Neuenschwander called Developing Meaning and I hope to finish my book I started in the class and post it on this blog. I am grateful to the Fairbank Calligraphy Society as I received the Esme Davis bursary this year to help with the costs of the conference. In September I will be presenting a talk on the conference experience for the Society in Victoria.....

Contemporary Book Structures

2008-07-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

For the Contemporary Book Structures workshop at VISA on the weekend of August 16 and 17, 2008 we are going to make two kinds of books. One of them is like this accordian book which has copies of monoprints which spell out the word "Compassion". The original monoprints were four by four inches and they were copied and then hinged in this concertina or accordian style. The book has a hardcover and is covered with Japanese Momi paper. This format is ideal for mounting photographs, collages, drawings, memorabilia and more. The benefit of working small is also apparent in this little book as you can experiment without using a lot of materials. Check out the workshop on the VISA website on the sidebar......

Flag Book

2008-07-05T16:20:00.001-07:00

This is a flag book I had done for the Ground Zero (GZP) exhibition but I am posting it now because of the upcoming weekend workshop at VISA on August 16 and 17th, 2008. The workshop is Contemporary Book Structures and we will create two kinds of books - one is a concertina or accordian style book and a flag book. The flag book in the image contains stencil prints of words from the theme of the GZP show which was "Word/Speak" and overlaid on alternating flags is a poem I wrote about the theme. The flag book is a perfect container for expressing ideas about text, art, photography, printmaking, drawing, panoramas and much more! Check out the website for VISA on the links in the sidebar for more information about this workshop and other great offerings......

Neuland and Watercolours

2008-06-20T10:41:00.001-07:00

This week I have been trying to do some new works with watercolours and the Neuland hand. Neuland was created by the German type designer Rudolf Koch. It was introduced in 1923 and is a very bold font. It is very flexible in its usage and this calligraphic variation has a lot of fine lines to try to lighten the look and give it a bit more liveliness and spirit. For the calligraphers out there in blog-o-land - the watercolours were done with Automatics and the black text was done with a Speedball C-2. The original piece is about 7 inches square.

Neuland is a good hand to learn. Jacqueline Svaren's book Written Letters demonstrates a double stroke Neuland done with a Speedball C-2. John Woodcock's A Book of Formal Scripts shows the use of two pen angles in a one-stroke letter. Woodcock also reminds us that Neuland has possiblities "for simplification to a point of semi-abstraction". That was what I was attempting to do with the watercolour letterforms - the whole alphabet is in there! I have always admired Paul Klee's works in which he composed his own text and then used letterforms and watercolours to create full and complete paintings. And so I have also been trying to do some watercolours using the abstracted forms.....

Metamorphosis of a Manuscript Page

2008-06-09T18:02:00.001-07:00

This past weekend the Fairbank Calligraphy Society in Victoria hosted a workshop with Georgia Angelopolous titled: Metamorphosis of a Manuscript Page. We looked at the Stockholm Codex Aureus for inspiration and used its forms and layout ideas to create a piece. This piece translated is: Love is essential for life. It was done on a piece of paper which I had gessoed and sanded and then added watercolours. The gilding is silver leaf and the basic colours are a mix of Daniel Smith Italian Burnt Sienna and Winsor and Newton Violet and Raw Umber watercolours mixed with Permanent White gouache. This workshop was so much fun and it was interesting to look back at a manuscript and use its forms and ideas to create something new.... I particularly liked the quirkiness of these letterforms for drawing and the negative spaces they create are really interesting. Thank you Georgia for a wonderful weekend. Everyone's work was amazing! If you look on the sidebar and click Suzanne Cannon's blog you will see some great work she did in a unique way....

Black and White Drawing 7

2008-06-05T17:08:00.001-07:00

This is part of a series of six black and white drawings. It is back lit so you can see the transparent sandwich of materials in different layers. There is sewing, tracing, Japanese papers, cut papers and lines drawn with pencils, ink, and markers. This is a small portion of the larger drawing which is about 14 inches by 20 inches. These are the kinds of drawings you could keep working on all summer. The original tracings were taken from the book mentioned in a previous post and the point of tracing was to establish strong and confident lines.

Egg Tempera Workshop

2008-06-03T17:37:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I took a two day workshop with Jan Gates at VISA called Egg Tempera. Jan has studied restoration techniques and traditional Renaissance materials in Florence for a number of years. She is an excellent teacher and she had prepared wooden panels with gesso. This design is based on an Art Nouveau botanical illustration of nasturtiums....but it is not a copy of the illustration. The painting was done with ground pigments mixed with egg yolk. Free range eggs are best for their strong egg yolk membrane and I must thank Joan and Ginny for the very freshest eggs from their chickens. The last step in creating the panel was the background gilding.

Lauren asked me today how the background gilding was done. There is a layer of red undercoat, then an adhesive medium is painted on and when tacky - the gold leaf is applied. The leafing is imitation and is cut up on a gilder's cushion. The leaf sticks to the adhesive but one problem is that is also sticks to the painting sometimes. You have to gently work to get it off the right places and the piece was also touched up quite a bit afterwards with gilding in the small spaces. Thanks for asking the question Lauren!

Pen and Ink Drawing Book

2008-05-29T18:11:00.000-07:00

Here are a few images from a black and white drawing book. There are letters and words cut from magazines, scribbled words, cut pages, brush strokes, off set pages, pen marks, stapled transparencies, tracing papers, strips of paper....all this combining of materials adds up to the kind of book which I think would be impossible to replicate. I could keep drawing in it forever but I have to halt....

Pen and Ink Drawing 6

2008-05-26T15:36:00.000-07:00

Last week Georgia Angelopoulos showed me these beautiful papers she had gessoed and stained. I gessoed this paper which was an unsuccessful monoprint. It is stained it with watercolours. I drew using the texture drawing from Pen and Ink Drawing 4. It was good to see how flops can be recycled and I have such a frugal streak in me that using things more than once is totally satisfying!

Pen and Ink Drawing 5

2008-05-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is "Pen and Ink Drawing" - but this one is not done with a pen but a brush to try and interpret some of the marks from the "wallpaper" pen drawing done yesterday.

Pen and Ink Drawing 4

2008-05-22T17:22:00.000-07:00

The source for this drawing is a collage of textures. The idea is to develop dark and light values by using stippling, hatching, lines, squiggles which look like letters, etc. This was done on wallpaper with two different sizes of Sharpie. I had a lot of pleasure trying to develop my texture vocabulary! Last night at our class looked at slides of the drawings of Leonard Baskin, Vincent van Gogh aand Jack Unruh who illustrated The Art of Birds by Pablo Neruda. These three are masters in pen and ink textures and they also use the power of black and white so dramatically.

Pen and Ink Drawing 3

2008-05-17T15:05:00.000-07:00

This is a part of a larger pen and ink drawing. I used the previous posting for a source and did the drawing on printmaking paper. The washes did not buckle the paper so much this time and I enjoyed using the Chinese brush and my pointed nib for drawing.

Pen and Ink Drawing 2

2008-05-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

Our assignment is to work from one drawing to the next...making tracings, adding collage elements and using a variety of lines and washes. This is yesterday's drawing created originally from a series of blind contour drawings. Today I am working on another drawing using this one as a model on a smaller sheet of paper.

Pen and Ink Drawing

2008-05-15T07:05:00.000-07:00

This pen and ink drawing was done in Nicole's kitchen. She had some interesting pieces of paper left over from a workshop she taught in bookbinding. This piece of Maidstone paper (the replacement for Stonehenge) was folded already in a concertina shape. Then she had these little offcuts. We had so much fun drawing on these "throw-away" kinds of paper - not so precious and it is terrible to be intimidated by your school supplies! I started a class - Pen and Ink Drawing with Wendy Welch at VISA - and so Nicole and I did a review of what we did in the first class last week. First we took objects and drew them, then a drawing from the first drawing, then pouring ink on paper and creating backgrounds, etc. We had so much fun and I was surprised at this last drawing - it is of a wrench - but not an ordinary kind. It was her grandfather's and had with a gentle Ess curve in it. A beautiful tool and it was a beautiful day spent drawing avec mon amie...

San Francisco

2008-04-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a few more pictures Neil took on our big trip to San Francisco - shadows on the sidewalk on a hot sunny Friday afternoon in Sonoma; the big sale window at Rosalie's wig boutique in North Beach and the Blazing Saddles bikes lined up so neatly. We were surprised by so many things! When we went to City Lights Bookstore I was amazed at the number of people in the poetry room on the top floor. And the number of poetry books! I bought two books of poetry there and a CD of spoken poetry. Mary Oliver's Red Bird and Behind My Eyes by Li-Young Lee. It was exciting to see that so many people are interested in poetry. We were also taken in by the architectural beauty of the SFMoMa gallery and the enormous size of the exhibitions and the space. And then when we went to Sonoma we found the linear quality of the vineyards to be so rhythmical as they rolled along the side of the highway. We think that it was wonderful to walk around and just look at things - like the vegetables on stands in China Town and listen to the seals barking their heads off......

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

2008-04-29T08:13:00.000-07:00

This is an image taken by Neil last week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is taken looking up at the walkway created by one of Olafur Eliasson's immersive installations. When you walk through the passage you are surrounded by reflective material which creates a spectrum of colours. If you stop in the middle - you can look backwards and see different colours from what you had first seen. Hmmmm....could this be a metaphor for life? This was an exciting week for us. We spent two days at this Museum mainly looking at the work of Lee Friedlander and talking about his photos. On Saturday we went to the Annie Leibowitz exhibition at Lincoln Park. We also enjoyed going to Crown Point Press and seeing the work of contemporary printmakers like Laura Owens, Shahzia Shikander and Julie Mehretu.

Spring!

2008-04-13T17:13:00.000-07:00

Today is a gorgeous day and the cherry blossoms are blooming as well as the tulips and daffodils! This quote was done in Neuland - a typeface created by Rudolf Koch. Enjoy the day!

Open House at VISA on Saturday, April 12, 2008

2008-04-09T16:48:00.000-07:00

This Saturday - April 12 from noon until 4 p.m. - there is an Open House at the Vancouver Island School of Art in Victoria. The day will feature demos from 1 to 3 p.m. There's printmaking with Susy Raxlen; a pinhole camera demo by D. Bradley Muir; and I will be doing a demo of writing with ruling pens. There are free refreshments! Meet all the teachers for the new Spring Session and enjoy this incredible salon of art work. (I was there this morning and the paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures are looking gobsmacking good!)

Fairbank Calligraphy Exhibition

2008-04-07T08:38:00.000-07:00

This is a piece I did for the Fairbank Calligraphy Society exhibit at the Sidney Artists Gallery on Beacon Avenue in Sidney, B.C. It is a monoprint with a chine colle of lettering....the quote by Sappho says "although they are only breath words which I command are immortal." The exhibition ends at the end of April and there are four artists represented - Trisha Klus, Christiane Lenz, Kathy Guthrie and myself.

Note on Tuesday, April 8 - I went down to the gallery this morning and it looks very beautiful. The space is open weekdays - Monday to Friday - business hours only.

Watercolour 26

2008-03-19T22:13:00.001-07:00

Here is a painting done on matt board with collage and watercolour and watercolour pencil. There is a resist of writing in the background. This series was great fun to do and I have about three of them so far using Cadmium Red and Neutral Tint for the grey......

Watercolour 25

2008-03-17T21:00:00.001-07:00

This past week in our watercolour class we are working on a series. Tracey brought in objects and flowers like this plant from the Hellebore family to paint. We are doing a series of the same object with variations in technique and collage. She demonstrated how to make a shield so that you can do your background wash after painting the positive image in the foreground and also how to do paste collage. We used a paste made with rice starch done in the microwave (2 parts water to one part starch) and then we were able to glue our papers to the surface. One nice idea by Janet was creating a vase from patterned paper in her painting. Jane painted a whole series of small format paintings of leaves with inks. I loved the beautiful rich purple colour of the flower and painted about 8 small paintings. Then I copied the images and mounted them in a small concertina book....this was a project which keeps on evolving.....

Yellow Point 08

2008-03-09T20:10:00.001-07:00

This is an image of an Adirondack chair and we are looking towards the water from the rock face in front of Yellow Point Lodge. Neil took this picture today and it was before we all saw a small pod of whales. It was thrilling to see how they moved with swiftness and grace through the water followed by a lone kayaker. We were at the lodge at the annual Fairbank Calligraphy Society retreat and our special guest was Martin Jackson who gave us a shareshop on double stroke capitals. Martin is an exceptional calligrapher and we were all delighted that he and his wife Patsy came to Yellow Point this year. Neil and I appreciated all the work of the society to have this special weekend at Yellow Point and look forward to seeing everyone again next March.