Calligraphy box breakout

December 6, 2008


This is the companion piece to ‘Enchanted Vessels I’  which appears in a previous post.

Both pieces are based on the following quote from ‘The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life’  by Thomas Moore:

    ‘Enchantment arises whenever we move so deeply into anything we’re doing that its interiority stirs the heart and the imagination’.

They were done in the context of an oil pastel series, so inadvertently solved a problem I’d been having with calligraphy:

As  result of working in the field of calligraphy for most of my adult life, I had become enclosed in a box I couldn’t see my way out of.  That box was ,’ Calligraphy is making beautiful legible letters to express a quote you like’.  When starting a calligraphy piece I would simply reach for my calligraphy materials, and somehow also my calligraphy mindset.

Though I’d done a lot of abstract calligraphy where the emphasis lay on the markmaking and expression, I’d not yet been able to find a satisfying way to respond to the many literary quotes that continually inspired me.  I’d end up ‘doing a piece of calligraphy’, and it was more of the same old same old.

So this piece, saturated with the magic of Moore’s quote, resolved my dilemma. Snatches of the quote are legible, but most importantly the essence of what touched me is expressed in this piece, and only in part by the calligraphy. The colours, the  monoprint, the handwriting and more formal letters, the  collage and drawing and stamps all work together to form a whole.


Quick art

October 16, 2008

Materials: iroko offcut, handmade vegetable paper, oil pastel tinting of wood, old camera filter, collage paper, silk thread. Size about 1 x 3 inches

I love doing these little assemblages at the beginning of the day, because, especially if it is a day with lots of business stuff to deal with, I get the feeling of having gotten my art time in.

They take so little time primarily because I always have these materials within hand’s reach in my studio.

I recently went through my collage scrap box and weeded out*, but still am left with a selection of rice papers, old wrapping paper scraps, scraps of handwriting and calligraphy on tea tinted (pseudo parchment) paper, postage stamps, hand stamped and rollered papers from my monoprint work, scraps of letters from friends with cherished handwriting and postmarks, my hand painted brown wrapping papers and tissue papers, etc.
In a separate hand sized plastic box I have precious scraps of hand marbled paper, beautiful cancelled stamps and other mini-treasures that would normally get discarded for being too small to keep.

In my work table drawer I have a small sewing kit with a tangle of silk and cotton embriodery threads. In a pinch I can go to another drawer and find a sampling of my hand painted silk scraps, felts, wools, and rainbow nylons from my old umbrella collection.



* (I made up little cellophane packages of extra papers, if anyone is interested in having some I can mail them easily. They cost 2.50 euros each.)