2021 09 04 DJ lecture2

so welcome everyone to the second in our lecture series with donald jackson we're very excited to continue this lecture series we have two more i'll show you exactly what we did last time and here we go so uh the society for calligraphy is presenting this 2021 masters lecture series with donald uh jackson uh called painting with words and from royal scri scrolls to the saint john's bible to have i had my breakfast yet master calligrapher donald jackson shares lessons and insights from a lifetime of working in letters so last time we heard uh learning and luck and this time we're going to be hearing earning and luck quills gold leaf and parchment who needs them keeping afloat over the years making things in ways that matter to you and for people who don't need them until they do i'm moderator kitty marriott founder and former president of sfc an honorary life member and the zoom was arranged by christy darwick as the master technician fixing anything that ever goes wrong she's also former president of sfc so i'm very proud to introduce donald jackson again um and i'd like to say that he is very welcoming of the questions that you would like to offer to him um but if you would please type question mark question mark question mark or the word question first in the chat which is at the very bottom of the screen with kind of a little uh comic bubble uh that would make it easier for me to gather the questions during his talk to present to donald right at the very end he will take some questions um uh at various times too when it seems to be apropos but please i would like you to know that he is coming from wales and that we are accommodating 27 different states and 21 different countries and with such a zoom with a huge participant to audience sometimes there are glitches in the zoom functionality so i would ask you to please have patience in case you are experiencing any of those kinds of problems so i'm now going to stop my share and we'll go to uh donald jackson who will commence with his lecture today well uh um i'm still looking at kitty which is no problem but i don't know where it leaves me at the moment you're on right now so very good thank you everyone else is muted christy has muted everyone so right now yeah well first of all we'll have the first uh image which is just to introduce you to where we are and we are actually uh those of you who have seen it before i'll remind you uh there is we are sitting just exactly i am looking out of that window there in the border country of wales and with me in the room uh is the uh uh uh carlos riva who i can't see but i am there you are it's sort of in and don't be put off by the mask uh and over in this in the dark well which she must she would step into the light of god well yeah okay there we are well that that that mysterious figure is sarah who has been the studio manager for i don't know how many years and saw through uh the biggest part of the bible production here and um is still uh helps me with trying to keep afloat with all my uh old man's uh uh technical problems um the um so what i want to say is this last week the last time we were i was talking about my beginnings and all of that and influences both from a life point of view from culturally and also um the work of other calligraphers that i managed to see in the provincial little time that i grew up in and the provincial art school that i went to uh college um and i missed out something and then started a lot of things but one thing in particular that was influential um and it some of the time i was talking last week i was i actually sought out two teachers um in london and managed to get a scholarship to come and study there with them um but the year before that i had gone to an exhibition in london it was the first time i'd been to london in my then 18 years can i um can i see this slide that we had there was an exhibition in london 1956 went down my teacher as i said before didn't actually um give a lot of instruction because we were working towards a level that he hadn't himself studied to and but he was very encouraging he arranged for myself and another calligraphy student to come to london which was a big adventure and we went to the exhibition and in it on the wall was this piece of work by irene wellington partly autobiographical in in its own way because she just put together fragments of um pieces of jobs and work she'd done and then she brought it bang up to date by simply inking sole of her feet or one foot and stepping on to a piece of paper and that was the last thing that went in it so it went from early days of this other little job she'd done and then she put that on there was an example of something fresh creative um classical in its execution but very fresh in its uh and um in its concept so i missed that and it was current it was it was it was it was pivotal and she was one of the students on the other hand my main teacher was much more traditional and would no more flying away i've ever done anything like this but he did more [Music] formal work so um i'm just now that was what we missed um and i um i wanted to let you know about that and now i'm going to move on to some questions um which i have here i'm gonna look at them on on my desk and the first one i picked out that what i wanted to first of all do is to say thank you to all of those people who responded to the talk last time sent some really nice comments in and it very encouraging that was for from to me and um also some questions i i read through all the comments and i also read all the questions and i just picked out a couple um just um to respond to them and to encourage you to send in more if you have i mean it's obviously unrealistic to select me to be able to um give a seminar on on that but i i'll just in a word one or two things um um there was a there was a question from peter um and he asked me really quite tough question um would i be uh dramatically use the word different calligrapher if i had not without my strong quote religious background unquote um oddly enough i didn't think i had a strong religious background uh certainly i went to a a little church school um which was the methodist school but certainly um methodists are not known for their interest in having um illuminated manuscripts but the particular head they're as the name suggests they're very sort of pragmatic approach uh to to um to uh their approach to god um and um but i did have this very um sensitive an artistic headmaster who it did encourage me but you know we are we are we work with what we get i mean we are part of our culture i mean i would have thought it was just as much a culture of work and working in industry and factories and um and the life about me than it was about religion but i can't say i mean but it was a good to ask to ask a question um we've got i mean all i can say is in chur in chapel which i used to go to once a week um and i used to not listen to the sermons particularly because it didn't mean a lot to me at being very young but there was an inscription around the balcony the foot of the balcony which went all around and it said worship the lord in the beauty of holiness now it didn't mean to literally go out and be a calligrapher you can be sure or be an artist it just meant be beautifully holy i suppose it didn't mean more than that to me what did it attract me was in my culture is um uh is um is the art of a book for the book and so much of it is involved um and um sorry um i just got off track a bit um much of it um the book art of christianity that appealed to me um and if who knows if i had grown up uh in any other part of the world in another religious tradition i might ever you know who knows i suppose that's the answer to the question in a way but i'm trying to be trying to see something central in it in the far as we we are certainly molded by our um culture whatever it is and i'm beginning to think that i'm going to come back to that point in a moment so thank you peter but i i i didn't feel strongly religious actually but who knows as a child whether i was was and didn't know it um so much of that then there was a then there was a question from holly monroe about chanini she asked to those of you who don't know if um if the gilding technique or recipes that i used for my most of my gilding work raised in burnished gilding was based on the writings of chanino chanini um uh i think probably the 14th century or turn of the 14th 15th century um professed to be um a maker of um fresco's panels really um and it's one of the very very few treatises treaty is that has come down to us which gives sort of pretty technical information about gilding but he was talking about gilding techniques in the and the preparation of the gesso but he was talking about panels gilded panels on rigid wood and um whereas what happened was uh the term in the last century um we um that well the 1900s i have to say um there was translation of of his work and people had to pick and choose what they thought this is uh people who are illuminators who were working on parchment and they had to pick parts of that recipe from the translation and um and it there was no specific there's nothing really specific it's like your grandmother giving you a recipe for your favorite ever cake i mean it doesn't ever work out like us and so it's very hard to put these things down and the answer is it's only vaguely um based on on uh ancino tunini because a there are arguments about the translation and the other is i was taught some guilding techniques by somebody who didn't actually think that it was correct so that's another long story but giannino chanini um it is a technical question and for that person um i'm just saying uh holly that uh it's loosely uh um based on that and and there isn't and um it's it's like the holy grail you know it's it's there and then it isn't at most of the time um that was a technical question and i'm seem not to be feeling as if i'm answering them um but um then there was a question from leslie mark in kansas city um who i think can work with um [Music] hallmark cards um as a calligrapher and she was wondering if since i was talking about how i'm as picking up grains of information here and there and having to look at books which were rather badly printed very few books she wondered if on the other hand today there is so much readily available and online or digitally that maybe that would work against somebody like me that's um if i was you know born and inherited this kind of a scenery uh and an options it's a good point i mean again it's it's sort of basically unanswerable but it doesn't mean to say it's not a good question um i i think for sure um i actually love it i mean i love the fact that there's all this information i love the idea that you can be play with the computers when i first saw my first mac i i we did not have i've never used one them graphically until we started on the bible project and that was only basically so we could organize chunks of text um but i loved the way you could play with colors and and vary them and so on i loved all the information at the press of a button but it doesn't mean to say that after all these millions of years that our hands um are really only [Music] good to be used for pressing the bomb um or moving a mouse around uh so i suppose in a short i'll refer back to things i was talking about last week is this is this um um didn't quite nobody is just somebody is disturbing your speech by moving papers and and other stuff not here yeah i know i was seeing online right and okay it's only like plumbing i was wondering what was going to hap a sound i was going to hear next but it was all right we'll we'll wait for that to happen if it has to um yes it did sort of break my train but um what i was talking about last time whatever environment you're with you that's it you work with it you work with it but and what i was talking about last time was you can create within whatever mayhem indeed plethora over you know burden with information you can create your own bubble your own creative bubble and within that look and explore your inner feelings and try to explore ways of making marks which somehow the harness those feelings now um as i said that's not putting your head in the sand that's just creating and choosing your own space within within to work within to work within um uh i'm just just taking a look at my notes for a moment here and it says um working there is no there is no question that working with print and does never press my buttons you know to go back on what i just said um i can't get involved in it whenever my artwork i've done a working footprint as part of you know one's job in life um i've never it's it's never allowed me to feel those feelings that i need to feel when i'm doing things uh like that so so there is that that does work against it but that so yeah computers are great computers but you have to make choices and i actually think and i think that it may you know it may militate against children or younger people moving into uh life from wanting to ever dip a pen point in ink on the other hand it could drive them right into doing exactly that as an antidote to what the deficit that whatever deficit there is yeah so that's that and i'll and lastly for that for now um as a question which again is another this is a heavyweight one which says what is the most meaningful work you've done in your life and what has it meant to you how do you do that so i've tried to answer it and um apart from [Music] apart from perhaps the time that i actually made some marks with that first pen point that pen that was given to me by my aunt and given me the red pink and you've heard me the story of that was that set me a like just dipping that pen red ink putting it onto a piece of paper that is a feeling i go back to as a definition of a life changer but she's had a piece of work so let's have that piece of work next one i know how to do it that's that is it and it's i just call it the black cross and it was a commission why is it why is it the most uh what's meant to me the most to what to do meaningful i don't know what it meant to me was this uh and if you hang in on these talks you'll find out that i do find it really hard to get down to anything that's really asking the most from me i'll do anything else almost then sit down and do a piece of work that somebody says i will pay you to do anything you like and i will go into a funk because i get fearful that when i ask myself to do something there won't be anything there and anything in any case that i do will only expose me to be a fraud and all kinds of weird stuff like that so i left this piece i was commissioned along with a dozen other artists by somebody who put money on the table and said i'm going to i'm a dealer and i'm going to publish a catalog and i'm going to sell it it's very unusual that the calligraphers and he said i would like you i've seen you do some things he noticed religious things and he said i'd like you to do nondimitis and um and this is the quote and that was it the guy was coming in the afternoon i don't know what's happening there but but um um it's not that no i don't know that's that looks like a little whisker that's gone hi uh what happened is um he was coming to pick it up in the afternoon i had not done it in the morning and it was a deadline and deadlines and you know either they can either well whatever i wrote that piece of unskillish writing it seemed quite good felt that just wrote it i then went out into the yard picked up a box of apple box thin cheap wood tore it apart got an axe chopped down the piece one piece of it took it back up to the studio rolled black ink onto it and stamped it can we have it back up yeah and stamped it down the center picked up the other piece inked it up which is the what i'm looking at at the left hand side put that on and then of course i did i need to do the other half so i just inked it up again and smacked it down then i took gesso and with using um a coarse brush put in angel's wings gilded it and it was ready for when he turned up practically wet that piece i stood back having all well no connection it just came i felt that i just had a baby i mean it just was there um and uh he took it from me and i didn't see it again and that piece though taught me uh a feeling it introduced me to a feeling of a lack of responsibility the responsibility was not mine it just it was came to somewhere else whatever label you want to put on it now there are is another story attached to that but i will not let hold up um because i did get to meet up with it later in life um that piece uh find me again and i'm if i've got time and i've got a good enough excuse i'll talk about that in in again so because now we're going to get on with the subject of tonight that was a long session of questions i think it took far too long um for my uh waffling i don't think perhaps won't start with questions another time we've got questions right but i'll take the some of the time off the end uh when which is officially slated for questioning uh questions and so we'll get kicking and we'll get started on on what we are talking about tonight that's a subject um the um here we are what we'll start with is we'll just change a wee bit i'm just going to do what i asked you to do last time and that is to stick my pen in the ink just to bring me down to earth and do the usual introduction if you can turn the camera on and so we have the old a let's start off with that's not supposed to look like a car crash um but the whole thing is that we can we can do i'm just gonna get rid of that um we've got the possibilities in our hands to take the lines for a walk and this a can start with this and we can come down with this oh fairly graceful and light so we can go from this point here very fine we can do something else here we can go we can make other mixes fine we can do that so this instrument this just read can go from very fine and free and flow and you can just go to that you've got all of that space between you can put that in delicacy you can go skating on ice and then you go right on your backside this is where the fun is so that's where you put your pen in the ink next time it comes out it comes out and we can be doing stuff like that does that ruin the read sure did no expense pad on this program okay let's uh let's move on it's all about putting the pen in the egg um [Applause] uh tonight it's not not a gallery show it's um show a lot of images but um i'm gonna start by it's it's about what happens to me as i go along as a calligrapher starting back um oh dear leave that alone starting back um just to put you in space in time um this is me just out of college wondering how to do calligraphy and make a living i had to teach because of the government telling me i had to teach for a couple of years uh rather than go in the army which they were was the other option and so in that room i sat down and tried to do something which i've also said i was advised to do if you put something in an exhibition it should be either something you want to sell or you want other people to buy or or commission or you put in and you put in work which is something you wish people would ask you to do more of so in that little room um i started out and i showed this last time i did a sort of showpiece scroll which is something that you know i believed would people would be prepared to spend money on because this kind of thing was went on a long time it went on it was common um i also did something i wanted people to ask me to do more of because i wanted to do it i wasn't committed to the religious side of it i wasn't committed to even what the words were i just had an image i wanted to push and push further uh and what i didn't show last time was i also did this other piece for a show which i hoped again and every time they turned out to be religious now that a lot of that's to do with the fact that that's that's where you use gold you you use this this medium where you immediately make marks uh which have have real deep um uh seriousness seriously enough to put gold leaf on not because of the cost but because you don't go leave a sort of um you know roadside i mean just just uh well i'm getting lost words here anyway this was it these were the three things that i put out there and what i'm going to say to you is they changed my life because over the years afterwards one way or another those three pieces brought in exactly what i wanted by the people who saw them and by the circumstances that that those those exhibiting those three pieces changed everything and so i sat there in that room and i produced these rather pathetically simple pieces of calligraphy i say pathetic because i felt that i felt they were very tentative and um so on but it was it was a presentation scroll you see that was the world that i was thinking i was going to be having to spend dude work for some small job i got for the church not a very good uh reproduction but remember this is 60 um odd years ago so we're lucky to have something and i didn't even own a camera so um a lot of the work just was never recorded um so books of remembrance um in churches very poorly paid and also um ran into difficulties because sometimes i wasn't even paid i mean even paid they just didn't ever pay the bill um and then from that little room i got married to mabel uh 24 years old and we bought this house and that was a state it was in and what's more it stayed very much that way um until gradually over five years i just fell in love with this house it had atmosphere built in the 1790s in central london whatever i just fell in love with it and my good amazing wife was actually daft enough to just go along with it but that took up a lot of my life it became something quite smart um that is a young younger version of my grandson pictured outside the home his father used to live in and literally restored the whole thing and went practically went bust but the thing that kept me afloat was this fillings humble fill-ins and um either done by me or by my assistant as that was on the right it's got a it's got a smear over it um just a simple thing like this but i learned something from this um i don't know what this is my account book it's uh you know near enough then um i was making for the whole year ah i can't actually read it actually i think it was just about 50 1500 in the year uh if that's what a thousand pounds would be now and some of that was from renting a floor some of it was the teaching and some of it was from working on calligraphy so we were pretty s trapped for money and that influences what you do um um during that time i took in a couple of private students one of them had seen a photograph of that scroll i'd seen a published in a catalogue in the u.s enid perkins new york she struggled with gilding saw that that scroll and contacted me in london and came over and had private lessons from me also the guy on the right guillermo rodriguez in puerto rico a banker and brilliant man in many ways um he saw that same slide when it was somebody was touring um showing slides of my it was called a thousand years of calligraphy and it was uh baltimore and washington so over over the years that one scroll that i did and actually financed myself to do brought in uh two major things one was guillermo who commissioned me to do a number of things and also gave me a first place to call when i borrowed the fair sold a house moved down the street to a cheaper place um and started building a portfolio of work to bring to the u.s and they were the first people that i called on and i borrowed the fair to get there to new york guillermo commissioned me um this was the commission he gave me uh puerto rican poet um in spanish to christ christ crucified uh and that was the beginning of a wonderful friendship and that i treasure to this day and there's me preparing to go to the us in my new old house um and there is a map of texas why surely enough there must be a mark for people wanting to buy a map of texas this is for a ignorant english person um thinking to go to sell his stuff in the us um and meantime doing this kind of work painted lettering i was taught by william sharpington this is engraved glass um sandblasted this is me carving a sign we remember the advice my main teacher gave me said be able to turn your hand to anything he encouraged me to do the book mining to do anything because he said you're not going to make a living as a calligrapher um and that's that this is me creating this for a group of um for a the the a vegetarian restaurant and which became a sort of small chain um and there are stories attached to all of these things what i'm saying is i wasn't just doing calligraphy i thought if i thought that this which is the craftsman potter's shop which le which was nearby to the to the vegetarians that it's not much point doing calligraphy on that so i created this out of um stoneware tiles and it was said crafts and potter shop across the thing so changing from carving to ceramic to engraving to click all time to do something there is a common denominator this is me painting the sign um another stuff for cranks there's a child chain stuff i'm going to go through this so it seemed better to have because of all the sort of handmade brown and pottery and so on it seemed better to me to have a contrast crisp contrast uh to this uh was this thing and we had fun then i put that in there to show you that we had a friend we we had a great time i had various assistants um uh some of whose names are familiar in the us charles pierce and um and the whole string of people but who'd stay perhaps charles has been me quite a long time and um others who helped to do things i'm mostly i've chosen work that i've done tonight but uh they helped too and so this is it this kind of thing that jobbing calligrapher does and i've moved away from something which i really want to say which is well what's going on why are they asking me to do this why we're doing uh why they're asking a click to do things and you know that was good fun just did it again you might be absolutely certain the printer was waiting at the door um this again this is you know for a tv station a welsh language tv station and then back here again in the studio always going through from 1964 would be these sorts of things i was doing for royal documents this particular one uh rather poignantly um was the consent for the marriage of prince charles to lady diana spencer and so there's a string of those but there's something that's tying all these things together um and there we have this rather grand um um statement uh of an historic occasion the marriage of a future monarch etc and on the other hand you had me doing the british telecom long service award which just involved the filling in of a name and what is the common denominator and and this is what it is you know when i said who needs it well people don't need it until they see it or have it that simple document which said for the post office we had big con big customers uh the post office for the whole of the united kingdom and the telecoms company which were both government owned and run at that point that is about doing something for somebody else it's it's you're putting something of yourself in to something to make it their name in that simple instance look as beautiful as possible and it's done by hand not by a computer i can tell you a real story in this room i had done probably a thousand or you know my assistant had actually done and at that point filling in the names but a thousand certificates saying um thank you for being with british telecom for x number of years this and this and the guy that came to collect them was a hard-nosed union boss he came in to this room and said oh what's all this yeah oh god i know what i'm wasting my time who believes that this rubbish you know and i said well you know people seem to like having these their names he said well yeah i said yeah all right you put the names in but except the signature there that's printed isn't it and i said no and he said well what do you mean he said well then that is that's that's such a body his sworn enemy the boss the boss of the whole of the welsh telecom thing and they these guys have been banging their heads together for years you know in meetings uh the boss versus the union and i said no he he signed every one of those by hand he says what do you mean he said well i know i happen to know he took 100 home every night for 10 nights and he'd signed them all himself the guy started tearing up there was a con connection that he'd never credited it just caught him by a complete surprise that he cried that he it was just that sense of these hands touching your hands by by what you've just written on the page not my calligraphy or our calligraphy but that that that's it and so that's where we come in we come in by handling words with emotion and beauty and at the same time we're even when we're filling in just a name just a name we are doing it in the best we can and all the time we can we are doing these everyday jobs we we're actually looking for to hit an an inner harmonic you're trying to strike a chord which is a sweet spot when that pen touches that paper or whatever and makes those marks and that you're handing over whatever way or other which is um and they and the other person that you are doing this for or anyone who sees it um it's you're giving them a service so um that applies right across the board and it also begs the question to why would you want to be a professional calligrapher which means why would you want to do it in a way which means you have to um make money from it um the answer i i will come up with in the end for myself but right now even being doing beautiful these then become production line at times sometimes the government these are these are all the beginnings of royal documents um some of those uh east uh done first and the writing afterwards because every now and again the government will drop on you with wanting 12 of them uh you know in a few days [Applause] and so that's that becomes um why why is it not moving thank you and again they vary at different times and you know you get to see formal things sometimes the queen turns up to uh to accept these things or give these things and you know you're mixing uh on that level and so you've got to polish up your act and unlock the part and um and then this was a swingingly difficult commission um government laws meant that all the boundaries of the cities changed and legally they ceased to be in 1974 and they i had to literally write out uh 43 of these in two weeks and that meant just right out then they had to go to the house of lords to have this seal put on them and they were delivered back to me uh with the seal hanging on and then you have to kind of work with that on your desk to get put in the finish put in this then um this is a one in preparation then we thread this through the bottom the this ribbon of vellum just give the bottom of it um rigidity and then the ease had to go on if there's the 43 of them one after another after another and over probably about two months the rest were all done and here's a picture of me with a red box delivering my sort of uh two or three days worth of work to keep the guy in side the eyes of parliament there who had the seal of england putting it on the seal seal onto the documents um i'm getting in myself a bit stop whatever happened then one day as i'm nearing the very end i get a call from the crime office to say uh how come all of these are all wrinkled and i i didn't know what they're talking about and it turned out they they were assuming that it was me who had delivered them in this state whereas in fact it was the guy who was putting the seals on and they came out from the press hot and he was using the tap to cool them down and what he was literally doing was soaking the parchments the vellums in water and then turned around and said look look what these look like he didn't admit to the fact that he'd done it and so this is the sort of thing is character building this when you are building up for something you're doing loads of work you're sleeping literally six hours a night and doing them and in order to have them all ready to be presented at the right time and so um i don't know what happens next um i can go back i suppose can i go back with doing that or how do i do did i do it this way yeah that's it thank you um so just to get that um i literally had to cut the seals off and start again there were probably three or four more which i managed to rescue by putting under a press re-rehydrating and putting under a press and um even at the end of this project um they called up and said we're one missing uh you we don't seem to have received it and again i knew i had sent it but i had to do another one and then after this guy who'd done the ceiling left they discovered yet another but folded up and stuffed behind a radiator so that sometimes your work is not entirely um respected or looked after or um anything else the poor guy was just overwhelmed with too much work and then other jobs and this is one i'm not gonna i'm gonna continue a little bit with this because it shows you that sometimes silly things that you go ah that's how i do it uh the silly things you get to do and this was a a bank one of the main banks in the uk's uh ad campaign um they've done a series of really successful cartoons on tv um commercials and they wanted me to do some graphic interpretations of them so um i i ended up having to paint this princess um in a pseudo-illuminated letter she's on the phone obviously um an early cell phone and um but i had to learn to do it i just had to be thrown in at the deep end to do it uh and likewise this other job here where this is a yet another of the cartoons that i had to take literally i had to stare at the at the at the screen and work out the right moment to capture what was the key part of the the punch line of the ad myself and i had to do then replicate it but silly as that was i mean and again you know you get paid so much more by the advertising business than you do from anybody else because they get a percentage but this is a direct i want you to remember this i'll go back um look at look at the hands oh boy the hands i was forced to do hands that looked sort of credible and i then later on from the rodriguez family was commissioned to do guess what looks quite familiar a trinity of its commission to do that and again i would have been at sea but having done those hands i i'm sorry i'm moving around because i'm actually what's happening is i can't see what i'm looking at because of the well i can know if you look at the hands there and there and there is a hand somewhere here i actually couldn't have imagined doing those if i hadn't done that crazy ad all those crazy ads and doing that prepared me to be able to um to work on the saint john's bible it gave me the courage to be able to take on painting a face with an expression and this is adam and eve um so what i'm really saying is for all of that sort of bread and butter there's always room to learn and from those um simple beginnings and putting the bread on the water brought all these things in there are more uh how this is another way and again this is this is i'm putting this on because it's a traditional thing i like to show and it's it it's me working on a formal document a formal book for the post office and a book of signatures and i'd come up with this pseudo-victorian detail uh at the end of a rivet ribbon and at the end of it a duel unfortunately it's on paper you can't correct on this kind of paper and i dropped a blob of blue ink onto the plain white page and so what i then did was painted the the um the star the jewel without a jewel and painted the jewel as if it had dropped right on top of the blue blob that i got rid of my mistake by making it into a jewel so you know you can have fun and you can also um as you do these things and i love the idea of being able to get away with it by doing something like that um which dropped out of its socket um so that's a traditional one but then i stole the idea that i got for myself on one thing which was on the post office and this is a play job where i was paid to play given a quotation and said just do what and it's all about the neurosis of artists and musicians and creative people and how most of us enjoy what they've done at the cost of their pain and so there you recognize the jewel i took and used it again on the thing so and so on back to this is one last um little run this is where guillermo rodriguez and i are working together and he commissioned me to come to the to puerto rico and work on a book which he he was himself very interested and extremely capable calligrapher and he had me basically he had the money to hire me to go out there be his private tutor live in his home and create the book while i was there and the the idea was quotations and alphabets and some decorative uh thingies and so there are different ones this is just a little selection this was reversals and remember this was 1970 four i won't say it could have been nineteen seven t three five something like that um and so i was having fun and this time being paid to play on parchment on vellum rather and doing playing with different alphabets there's the alphabet there's the the quote in the alphabet and again there's another one fooling around with italic if we had more time i'd give you a critique of that which might be useful to you but i we don't so we'll move on and then had fun painting bugs and those of you who remember what we talked about last time i was one of my earliest things i loved uh and made me want to do illumination was looking in a book which had lots of leaves going in between all of the lines and that was a little kind of little thing from the past that came out there playing with gothic not my normal kind of scene but in the end the only other shall we say dimension for once calligraphy life and work is playing and that play is the other element that putting the emotion into what you do putting and looking for those little tiny victories where something goes right where it it just rings that little harmonic belt but then playing is another one where it's just nobody's paying you to do it and you're just trying to see what happens when you put that pen on the paper and things of this kind now at the end i just have one other thing i was playing but this did end up being something which was for the um um obviously the magazine and the economist but there is a link here which will take us to what happens in the final session that we have of these four sessions is that that was part of that cover was i used the artwork from that as part of the pitch um to saint john's abbey and university when it came to discussing whether or not i should be commissioned to carry out the saint john's bible and that was a commercial can't be much more commercial the economist but a thing like that that side of my life linked straight into the finals story which we'll be coming to later um i think that's probably the last thing and we just ended there um with me not having said anything like i would like to have done but there we are um so i will come to some questions in a moment but um let me just gather my thoughts here along the way i have of that lifetime of doing lots of things so you've got the strands i haven't deliberately talked about teaching um in any only referentially um which i'll be doing next time when i'll be talking about you know spreading the word as it was it turned out to be um it turned out when i first came to new york um i i met the best people kindest people and extremely high level graphic design and people who had some from europe some homegrown in the us um and who'd settled there into new york and who were not um in any way um suspicious of me moving in on their their patch but welcomed me with open arms and i could give you a list of names i won't not right now but um i was met with kindness and i did sell a lot of that portfolio of work and um that gave me a huge start and um both in my own confidence and um [Music] in what turned out to be a way of life there after and um so where did i i didn't mean to get to that just at that point anyway um oh going back over i have actually sat and tears have gone down my nose and dropped onto the work that i was working on during the course of those working live that working life when the client has come into the room when i was in that room as a student just as a post student i saw the shot of me sitting at my desk in that one room in near to my college and the guy could not believe i'd been recommended to do something for as a 85th birthday presentation for uh sir winston churchill um and he was in charge of it and when he said i need to see it well that was smart because of course as i have confessed i generally leave things to the last minute uh on this time i hadn't and it was in the process he turned up and he was shocked to find this uh 21 year old doing this what he considered to be very responsible position a job and he just harangued me i mean he just basically kept on calling me up and saying is it finished now and he couldn't trust me he didn't trust me uh and at that in the end and i ended up with the tears dropping onto the piece of work which fortunately i was able to rescue so you can put a lot of yourself into these everyday jobs as i would call them some of them very high quality requirements but at the end of the time i actually think it's the play when i look back it's what i chose to show and i wasn't being paid for i have done things a lot of things that were the best of my ability and uh and i have relatively well succeeded which i was paid for but those routine tasks all i don't have many pictures those two certificates were all i could find we used to do thousands for and i say we at one point um seven people worked here and that again was a preparation for the saint john's bible because there was not just me there were other people working and i had to know how to handle that situation and so all of these things prepare so um um i'm going to stop now for a minute and ask um kitty if she's got some questions for me i'm going to have a drink of water and um uh we'll we'll move into question time um and i'm going to just let go of the stuff that i haven't said yet maybe i'll say it sure i'm just going to just drink thank you donald i'm looking over lots of questions but there are so many wonderful comments that you'll want to read later so many people feel relief that you're like they are well absolutely yeah i'm just writing down this one this question that just came out um you carry on actually on that point even the simplest handwritten look you know it we are fortunate in being i mean i say we as calligraphers but then there are many people who are not i mean one of the things that just getting a handwritten letter nowadays is is a pleasure the simple pleasure that that gives that somebody took the trouble to acknowledge you to send it if it's gorgeous uh to look at it wouldn't be one of my letters uh my um at one time loose trick who was the creator of the pentalic um and tapping the publishing um and was a great support calligraphy and 70s 80s 90s he um he used to he wrote if this if this helps anybody he uh spoke to me said could you possibly in future type your letters to me about business he said because actually i will confess that what we do is we have a pin board in the office and i put your letter on it and pin it on and i invite interpretations from all the rest of the staff and between us we usually figure out what it was you're trying to say so you you um you know but still it was said it was it was it looked good but um it didn't have create anything other than a good impression uh um didn't didn't create any information right you ready kitty sure whoops yeah so uh we have a question from todd jameson who was writing all those formal documents before you had a chance to do them um there was a a guy called in the old days i mean on one of the slides i have showed you on the wall was a vast uh parchment with big huge i mean hand sized coats of arms down the sides of it and that would have been done by the old victorian scrivener illuminators that would be somewhere behind you know in the back office in the house of lords and they'd and uh so as recently i i don't know probably uh in between the first world war a past you know in between probably 1919-ish i'm guessing on that grealy here was an illuminator and he was by the way the other thing that impressed me in that 1956 exhibition there was some of his work and that was covered in gold and it was exquisite and that that must have made a big impression i didn't imagine i could ever do it but um and and he and there was an there was an uh cultured man in charge of the crown office and he said look we can't have these gross sort of looking scroll shop pieces of work there is such a thing as a craft revival there is such he knew about edward johnson he knew about the calligraphy resurgence um at the turn of the century and 19th and 20th centuries and he said let's commission someone who's a real you know an artist calligrapher and so that guy was called grady here and he was a a student of johnston's uh an ex-lawyer and uh he and his assistant cook aida henstock so that's h henstock hewitt he was called h1 she was called h2 and she did a lot he did a lot they worked together so that's first then he died either headstock carried on and when she said i can't do this anymore oh by the way they always they after he died they appointed another person so there would always be two so if one person wasn't on hand to do the overnight business that i was talking about then there would be somebody else who could step in she was called dorothy cotton and if you a student of 20th century calligraphy she was part of that society of scribes illuminators um [Music] senior people i had a henstock got to the point where she got to rheumatically and they looked for a replacement for her so that's only hewett and han stop together um dorothy hutton and they were looking for another person the person in charge made a selection and before he sent out an invitation to five calligraphers i think he was or six to see if they were interested in doing this work it's quite prestigious not very well paid another whole story and um he just as an afterthought said to dorothy hutton is there anybody you could his work you think might fit in well with what we need because you know and she said well there's this young guy uh donald jackson he he did he put this scroll on an exhibition the same scrub the same piece of of advertising that i'd done in my you know when i was 22 or something like that and uh or one and she'd seen all the gold on it and she wasn't all that confident in gilding herself actually she was a good illustrator and an artist and um and a sensitive designer so he put me on the list and uh they chose me in the end they everybody was commissioned they did not to give them their credit they didn't say do something for free they said we will commission you to do three periods each they're mostly for peerages on that point and they and then they looked at the work and they chose me i always used to say it's because i was only 10 minutes drive away from the house of lords but um uh that's how it happened and that's who did it next question yeah so deborah bennett wanted to know how many calligraphers work for the queen i guess in general or right now so is it always two and are you working with someone now i'm not doing it anymore um this is the sad story folks um those main uh domain um i mean they were never vast numbers you know a dozen a year would be it it's only when somebody was made as it were our equivalent of a you know a senator i mean to be made into a lord and that would be that and then the occasional very occasional royal consent document like the one that i showed you the marriage consent um except when a government changes then there are lots of recommendations so that one part of the other should you know be sent kicked upstairs as they call it and um so then there would be a deluge you know i mean there could be 30 wanted and then and there's still the same two people um but in fact i i was fortunate because i had an assistant um who could do good illumination that was wendy uh selby she was wendy gould um and i had um others who helped me i mean and right up until fairly recently um sarah took up the the job of senior illuminator in the in the scriptorium uh to doing the illuminated ease which i then unfinished later so there was usually me i either wrote them or mostly write them or sometimes didn't but mostly me i mean not well no always my hand on it but um there were times when i could not cope um but but then still managed to somehow in those days but the sad story now is that um because i was working on the saint john's bible i have to say which is quite a big job uh in itself um and we were deluged by this time tim node moved in as a recommendation of mine to to take over from um when dorothy hutton um retired and so he's a a very skilled heraldic artist and a father of the society of scratch lemonade is brilliant there are even fewer now very few because guess what somebody discovered that use there's something called a bubble jet printer that will work on vellum so they print them by computer and and just hand fill in here and there this is on the the shall we say the highest document in the land is done mostly by bubble jet tim does the very special ones for something like the supreme court which still sticks to the to doing them by hand so um we are leaving different kinds of heirlooms to the future i'm afraid calligraphically this is probably as much as i need to say about peerages next question um that sort of leads into this next question have you created any but this is uh eric mcclellan have you created any pieces that you have chosen not to sell because they hold very special meaning to you ah your hardest holding back special things um not really because it's this is it this is that peculiar situation which is partly to do with my upbringing and my character which is um i never maneuvered myself and i've so admired people like thomas singh meyer who's managed to do this um into a position where i could work like a painter where you do actually say you can have a gallery or you know i'm not saying that's what he does but i mean what i'm saying is sits and does not mix up money with the art i've always somehow rather relied on it as for my income rather than teach now teaching i have done and enjoyed doing but um generally whatever even the thing like this in john's bible you are doing it for some body and there is something that can come in between um it had to be a lifetime of work for me to be able to be able to stand up for myself and say i want to do it this way and but that shopkeeper son in the back of my head is still trying to please i'm trying to meet that person that's the other aspect of all that experience is you're doing it for someone um not just for yourself that's what the role was and in this case i was doing it for a religious community and and that i was allowed i always had that in mind so there is a different chemistry there uh where you know that's why my closing comments this evening well i don't know how far we are off the end um do we have anything for the last half hour um how long do we have i'm sorry as much time as you want 12 30 11 minutes yeah okay so that's right yeah oh that's fine okay it's just um so i'm sure i had something else up my sleeve um [Applause] no i don't have any more questions did you want me to go through those or did you want to wrap it yeah yeah that's fine as long as they bring up well you that was a good question which i didn't answer um i have to say uh i got there are one or two around but they're generally speaking ones which i have given to my wife and so they don't get sold for that reason you know that's the sort of thing i i i'm trying to think about i can't think about what's most precious to me i mean i have to say the black cross was um but i'm happy to be where it is i maybe i should tell you the story about that no sure uh we'll be talking about the conferences and things of that kind and how next time but on the way to i think it was the second conference um the all of the um tutors as you traditionally or it was a new tradition then um were to bring a piece of their work to put on the wall as an exhibit during the week of the conference so that was one thing that we were supposed to do and um i was so flat out uh doing the kind of things that i've been sharing with you that i just didn't do anything for you know uh and i was i think on that occasion i was sort of keynoting um the morning's sessions for the conference uh together with uh kaz tanahashi from san francisco and um if i've got the right conference anyway i end up sitting on a plane with anne heckel one of the other instructors peter holiday another three of us on a 7 47 heading out to minneapolis and just before we left i turned to mabel my wife and said you know what i wish there's one piece of work i would like to have and if i had thought about it i would have chased it up i had one piece of work i would like to have shown and and i said it's the black cross but i had no idea what the dealer had done with it so on and so forth uh the week before i arrive at minneapolis i get um i get to the um i i actually was coaching the um coordinators or whatever you call the facilitators for the week in in the evenings and i got there in the morning and i was teaching a class of the 24 or 26 or 22 facilitators and as uh one of them was leaving i knew met her before in previous years she said ah by the way somebody came in to my frame shop this morning and she's end with a piece of work of yours i'm getting goose bumps all over again when i think of this and um obviously you know what's going to happen so i i said i had i couldn't think of any pieces of work floating about that i didn't that would she said oh um he said well i told him i'm going to be seeing you tonight he said well well wait until you see him because he may have suggestions for how to frame it and i said what was it she said well it's a kind of black cross and she said well i said grief she said well i said well who's got it she said well this guy she gave me his phone number he was some um a kind of help for the bishop of minneapolis he'd seen it in a catalogue he explained to me and bought it while the bishop showed it to the bishop the bishop had bought it to go in the cathedral in minneapolis so i said well when's that when when did you buy it he said uh oh he said i i don't know when he bought it he said but um i i picked it up today i said what do you mean picked it up he said in those days you could do this he said well i i picked it up off the plane from london that came down it's difficult that came in this afternoon and on that flight i turned to those two other calligraphers and said you know what i really the thing i would have liked to have had was the black cross to show on the wall of minneapolis and it was flying with me on that plane and to somebody i was going to meet that evening and i said i said good grief and i'd said this to the to the man who brought it into the frame shop and i said i wonder if the bishop would lend it for a week and he said i think in the circumstances of your story he's not in any position to refuse so i did get the story out and i be sit on that it's very occasionally i just tell it but i've it takes quite a lot of explaining away whatever you'd say i'm sure a statistician would shred it but there we are um so another question have we got time for donald we have uh three technical questions i'll put two of them together um and then i'll do the third one and then you'll uh do whatever you'd like for wrapping up so allison clement says i see a lot of quills in your studio is that the primary tool that you have used for lettering and from mina taylor what kind of ink did you use for the many documents that you did for parliament uh one quilt par excellence uh the tool um because it gives the maximum amount ah right i mean i always swoon when i see an oriental uh calligrapher working with a brush and think of the of that that that the contrast you can get from the finest line to the thickest splodge of ink has got so many possibilities in between it for as a tool but the quilt and tonight i showed a read i showed you it can go from fine to absolute impact of an explosion on the page it needs to be nurtured it needs to be kept sharp it it sometimes isn't sharp but that doesn't matter because the form of the letters flows from your hands it's made of the same substance as your fingernail it's a part of you it becomes part of you just as a violinist plays wonderful sounds out of a basically a cigar box you know with a string tight across it and so the primitive tool of a quill is capable of creating some of the most extreme i mean some of that some of that copper plate which was the original writing um incredibly fine and and varied and so on but it's sympathetic it's warm and it takes to ink coming to your second question it if you dip still pen with varnish on it into ink the ink rolls back off it to begin with until it bites into somehow or other into the metal and the metal is not so generous it doesn't impart the ink with the same um ease so it it provides flow through that slit the touch on the surface is subtle and it's um answers your very every tremble steel pen you can put down there and hold it there and it wouldn't pick up your heartbeat like well now that the ink um the point is sticking is so the only point there is control because there's not usually a store that you can walk into and buy a bottle of ink that's going to flow readily or you know give you that action if when you put your foot on the gas with a pen you want it to go you don't want it to stick and or stutter because it's too gloppy in the ink so the way that you get over that is that you get basically um soot uh oil i don't know it could be either oil based soot or it can be from special woods bound with a little touch of gum so that when you grind that in water you can control the fluidity um most of the time nowadays you're better off just mixing it from out of gouache or something like that i mean i'd i can't point in the direction of a bottle of ink that um that is great you can get used to anything i'm amazed at what i mean higgins people always used to use something called higgins ink in the us and i couldn't get that to work but other people could they got rounded it was more difficult for them than making a stick ink grinding it and to produce the right um viscosity you can always add a drop of water if it gets a little bit too sluggish or you know add a little more ink if it gets watered so so it's one thing you take responsibility for you do it because it does what you want it to do rather than you know uh buying it off a shelf i've never been interested in the cookery side of calligraphy i i truly you know to ask me for instance about cenino chanini's recipes i know about the history of it i know a lot about how people got to where they were the question mark is still in the air by the way about how to get really good reliable gesso it certainly was done in the middle ages um i think in that case it i actually put a card on the table i think it was something called parchment size so in other words you boil up the offcuts from the parchment or the i'm using the word apartment i'm gonna say at the moment and boil it up until it becomes a sort of gelatin and then you warm that up and turn it into a liquid again and then you put that in your in your lead and your plaster and your um um whatever else um you that i think is much more like what i think happened but who's got who has been able to pass that on it hasn't been able to be passed on i've tried it myself and i was pointed in that direction but it didn't work so well as the kind of hewitt grayly hewitt based fish glue and animal glue binder and when that works it's like magic but i also know that the considered opinion of his um um chemist if you like right hand man um was that it should be parchment size i can't recommend it to something that's worked for me um but i i still feel that's the holy grail that i talked about earlier so stick ink quills very fine fine work to be honest i would use a steel pen for tiny lettering um if need be i mean i'm talking almost in invisible um and that it gives you a control because the quill is a little flexible and if it's lecturing the tiniest extra pressure uh it will pick up on and so that really i'm talking 16 of an inch i'm really talking that height then i'd go to steel okay um that i think is a fairly full answer to that question have you anything else to to yes so i've got another technical question then two other really good questions came up at the end which i think would be good ones too you'll probably need another hour to answer this well that's what i'm a bit afraid of that's all right we've got we'll meet up again yes so let me give you this technical question from sarita d i am very intrigued with the double lined letters do you need a special pen to do those um yep you can uh i've been wondering i couldn't remember what pen i use for that but i'm just pretty sure having given you the whole uh megillah on um quills and reads i'm fairly sure that in 19 oh 60 ah right it was it was uh yeah no early 70s um that double line italic uh was um dumped by a um what do they call the automatic automatic pen with a notch out of it so that was probably done with steel or brass that's a sort of flexible one but i think it probably is brass isn't it nickel plated um i have some old ones um although i have also quite successfully used a broad turkey quill which has been flattened under heat and cut two notches and made two separate nibs out of the end of it so you can do it that way you can do it out of a reed if you put two slits and then cut two nibs out of the same and then you could then do it you then it will work on it for a limited amount of time so i think that's it although it seems to me i haven't seen that book for since nineteen 90 so that's you know 30 years ago so i can't i can't no uh remember how i did it i looked at the side and couldn't make up my mind there we are it's the best shot i've got other one okay um so goalie uh ostobar asks kind of a big question and i think in a way this is the reason that i decided to ask the society for calligraphy if we could have you as a lecturer not just a lecturer but a series of lectures so that it could reinvigorate all of the people from all over the world that are watching you now to go out and inspire young people and older people to do calligraphy if they and then when i come along and tell you i come along and tell you that you end up weeping over what you do that's why we do it we have to but here's the question uh donald trump goliath says how do you keep calligraphy alive and create enthusiasm in the younger generation who are tied to iphones they're not even being taught cursive in the schools what do you do and also barry morenz has the same kind of lament what do you say to and so i've completely failed with my own granddaughter i have tried various ways i mean i don't know who she takes out but she's not too keen on receiving instruction that way if she sees it as an instruction so i will say failed there so speaking as a failed um uh teacher in that respect and and she has a gift she has a gift she has it without any instruction it's there and uh and i should know but that she doesn't realize that either so um um but it's to do with the person in this case i mean she doesn't think she's very good at stuff and i relate to that and it doesn't matter how many people tell you you are it's you you know you still you know whatever you if you if you don't do a lot of work to yourself you're going to keep on repeating your own sort of you put you you put you put limits on yourself and i think that's what's happening there the key is engagement somehow rather to engage the kids in children quite frankly the whole thing about as you say penmanship or or learning to write by hand it is counter-cultural now if we could sort of get them to think they were rebelling by by doing good handwriting or lettering then maybe you'd have you get engagement i'll tell you a quick story on that los angeles story one of your members or in the past came to her class and she said she was just about to be fired um or let go as you say um from her art class because they the school district she was in in the la area whatever it was i said that they couldn't justify the expense of art and she was teaching calligraphy mainly and uh what she was doing was relating to the kind of graffiti the kids were using on walls around the city and she was coming to them that way she was also teaching them black letter now in that school the way that they then as i understand it if you turn up oh unless you turn up in the morning and work the way through the school day you don't get to do the last class of the day you don't get to and they put her lessons at the end of the day and the kids were coming to school just to come and do their black letter lessons and they were still gonna fire her until she came up with this and it sort of sums up the position of calligraphy really culturally in our culture she said um they said well how do you justify what you do she said well it's teaching them english language skills oh well in order to do the lettering they've got to be able to learn to write and they're writing and they're having to put work letters into words and words into sentences and these kids who are coming and going without learning they're now learning to read and write oh you can keep your classes so i wouldn't i wouldn't advise you to go to the lengths of starting to teach football or whatever else school thinks it's important these days um just it's just to be able to get them to do cluegram but um that engagement at whatever level there were two parts of that question um one was kids basically and that's tricky unless you can do unless you can somehow work out are better brains of mine on this subject this point is my what i was wanting to be my closing remark to you all today um and will be actually i have to say but this must be the final question and it will be my last word on it the the last one was and it was about barry's i think was to do with barry's question was to do how to keep calligraphers motivated and i think if you look back at my sort of very truncated um display of things i've done over the last 60 years or more the things that the things that moved me forward the things that even provided me with the opportunity to be asked to do things which i wanted to do started not started with play playing playing without any need to please anyone other than taking a line for a walk um some thought came into my mind here um making marks and deciding what pleases you what pleased you what pleases you about some shape rather we've all pretty much got an agreement about what's vertical and we've also got pretty much agreement i mean i'm not talking about people with astigmatism or whatever but there is an agreement what is that way what is that way um and there's some harmonic an inner harmonic i mentioned something when it a little tingle of pleasure comes from something because of what it looks like or felt like the pace pay off what's in it for you you know how do you keep people interested is because there's something in it for them something emotionally in it for them and so play creating spaces within which to play in your life and with whatever tools you might say oh yeah but i don't know how to work those tools uh okay look go down to the beach if you're in los angeles and do some lettering in the sand and let the sea wash over it because that's what time is going to do with all of our work eventually so why are we doing it we're doing it to grow into that space that we create and who play something that came to my mind earlier today lots of things come into my mind when i'm thinking i'm going to be talking with you everybody um and then they go out but it's also tricky to put them over but um all i can say my did say i've written it down somewhere here the chemistry of the act now i don't know i that means what goes on inside you when you make an action and but finally play is the best play is the key put that pen in the ink and play and the more open you can be to that happening that instant then the more success you'll have and then you get that pay we are evolutionary programmed to keep doing different things to change things to put this here and see what that looks like next to that to do several more of them for their own sake just doing that for its own sake is the key of evolution which is plugging away in all of us um and so i think that's probably it we start thinking quite basically about it think about our personal evolution play for its own sake okay i'm going to say that because i repeated myself already too much i've kept awake far longer than i normally would be and on these occasions i'm glad to say it's nice to be meeting up with you again and i hope i'll see and hear from you with more questions uh next time so can i say goodbye thank you donald that was magnificent and you'll enjoy reading the chat uh thank you it's always always very nice to hear from you means a lot yes bye-bye bye-bye thank you goodbye thank you thank you thank you thank you everybody time to play all right i'll end the meeting and see you all next week thank you christy thank you kitty thank you thank you bye thank you goodbye thank you goodbye

Channel: Society for Calligraphy

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Length: 106min 29sec (6389 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021