jaeleslie

At the calligraphy conference in Ohio my first design class was with Judy Melvin. She used to work in-house at American Greetings, particularly in collaboration with Mike Gold, and I have admired their works for some years. She still freelances for American Greetings, which employs a full-time staff of seven lettering artists. For two and half days she took us through a number of ways to design a surface or texture with color and gesso and common household products. (Well, bleach.) All of us were working on long-format papers, 8-1/2 x 20 inches or thereabouts, and after demonstrating each technique we went at it, in a mixed-media extravaganza. Judy circulated and offered individual critiques on the dozens of works that each of the eighteen students were developing. At the end of the first day she started suggesting that we might start finishing something now. Everything went up on the wall -- then sometimes came down for more work.

I have run into some artists, like my conference roommate Marcia who is a potter, with a preferred mode of function that is, like mine, more tactile than visual. My own calligraphic work is so gestural in impulse that it often takes me some time to work out what it is visually that I have just set down on the paper. ( Read more... )