Calligraphy as a Spiritual Based Art Form

I, as well as many others are having great difficulty uploading pictures to Blogger tonight. I will therefor post my blog and upload the photos tomorrow when hopefully the server problems will be sorted out.
It's a long post, and I'm sure I'll add to it over the time.

Happy Birthday Edward Johnston - Our Granddaddy of Calligraphy... Hmmmmm an Aquarius! No surprises there then. Those who have read his biography by his daughter Prissila will know what I mean! lol.
Lovely, unassuming, gentle soul who just wanted to revive the Art of Calligraphy. Modern day calligraphers owe everything to him. And it's also Charles Darwins birthday too.... another Aquarius! and errrr for the record....Did you know Abraham Lincoln's birthday? lol

Anyway, on with the post....

Calligraphy as a Spiritual Based Art Form

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a long time. It’s something that is close to my heart and I ponder over time and time again. I have no answers to this, I only know what Calligraphy as a Spiritual Based Art Form means for me.

I’m going back come years now. It was my first venture into the big wide world, where I could meet other calligraphers and see their work. It was Lay Members Day of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators in London.
The guest speaker was a guy called Brody Neuenschwander. He was very smart, very hood looking and VERY well spoken. He dressed in a suit and a tie and his fingers looked like they had never even seen a pot of ink, let alone written any words. As most calligraphers know, you never wear white or dress in anything other than clothes you would normally not be seen dead in! Wearing decent clothes can almost guarantee that the pot of ink or pallet of Gouache will fly off your desk or board, almost with a mind of its own and launch itself over you at the rate of knots.
Although he talked a little about letterform, he was more interested in trying to get across the flow and movement of ink across a page. A gentle, graceful movement which had freedom while retaining the underlying meaning of the word. He likened letters to a dance, or music, where the beat and the rhythm formed part of the whole. Like skaters on ice, preparing for the end performance, each twist and turn in itself amazing, but the scores at the end were given on these movements put together. He encouraged us to practice a little every day, reminding us that concert pianists don’t just turn up, play than go home again. Their music was their life, and daily they would practice scales and music scores, so that the music became naturally and effortlessly, with no-one but the musician aware of the hard work put in behind the scenes. At the time and as a practically new beginner struggling to make my letters proportional never mind anything else, this meant absolutely nothing to me….. at the time.

Through a strange series of events I learnt to meditate. These events were the need to slow down, the need to learn to relax, as a form of visualisation (to diminish cancer) and along with the joining of a Yoga class. The Yoga teacher also went into the philosophy of health, healing, diet and the spiritual aspects of what we were doing. I was fascinated and probably through reading books on Chinese and Indian ways of thinking, my mind had been opened. I then attended a Buddhist weekend on Happiness of all things, and studied Buddhism as well and also looked at mysticism. Each path opened my mind more and more to the alternative cultures and lifestyles as well as religions around the world. I also studied Western and Eastern Writing and the connection between Spirituality and Calligraphy was born. Chinese and Islamic calligraphy is written with ‘spirit’. Each piece of a work is a meditation in itself. The work is created in honour of the god/s. Each mark made with either a brush or a pen is made from the inside of the creator and transferred to the paper or vellum, to convey the meaning of that ‘spirit’ to the reader. All this was making sense to me. I listened to music while writing. I found Pan Pipe music or New World type music would help me loose myself and during a large piece of work I was somewhere else. The pieces were finished almost without me actually being there, as if someone else had done them. I worked like this for many years and continued to learn from the Philosophers, teachers and sages who have existed over the years. I wrote down quotations that ‘spoke to me’ at that time. Quotations that I felt either motivated me or sat comfortable inside me, as if it were my inner truth. This made creating work all the more poignant and honest. I knew that through touching my heart it would also touch others. To this day, I’m still an avid collector of Truths!

Then pan forward a few years. I went on a long weekend workshop by Anne Hechle. On the first night we had a lecture. She showed a slide show of he travels in India, where she backpacked and had very little money. She slept on the flat roofs of buildings and slept under the stars. She talked more of her experience than of her calligraphy.
The next few days we learnt about ‘Sacred Geometry’. Some of it so hard to grasp that we didn’t really connect with what she was trying to say. We spent 3 days on ‘Sacred Geometry’ and as for calligraphy….it was hardly mentioned. But there lies a story, because once you have grasped it, everything else just falls into place. It’s our connection to everything, it’s placement on a page, it’s architecture, nature, man, science….. and all part of the bigger picture… Oh if I knew then what I know now! I really must make an effort to contact her again.
So really it’s rare that a Western calligrapher can make that connection between their work and their spirituality. I do. And I’m sure by now you’re thinking what is this girl on? What is she talking about? Is she for real? Or barking mad?

But consider this…..The bibles written by the monks were created in tiny cells with only candle light for company. Their gilding is exquisite, their paints ground from gemstones and mixed with binders, their vellum prepared painstakingly and then the binders making the covers out of wood and covering them with more vellum before decorating them with precious stones. Each one a piece of art in itself. Each one created in a slow and meditative manner, copied out by hand and bound so expertly that many of them still exist today and are as beautiful as the day they were created, by monks in solitary cells, which were cold and poorly lit, but it was their calling or mission to spread the word. There was no need to painstakingly decorate the pages with their finely drawn animals, birds, carpet pages and such like. If it was just the word they were trying to spread surly the lettering would have been enough in itself. No I believe that they were trying to capture the essence of something far deeper. The illuminators were the artists of their day. Each one had their own way of doing things. Throughout a manuscript you can see (ever so slightly) the many different artists that had left their mark on the pages. Sometimes two or three in one book, bringing the whole thing to life, a true connection between Spirituality and Calligraphy.

Today, Western Calligraphers need to connect more to the spirit of what’s inside us, in order to transfer that message to others.