 So what makes calligraphy fun for me? these these static letters 2,000 years old they just I love making them a Roche presented this thing that nobody's ever asked me what makes calligraphy fun in a presentation and and I thought about what feeling comes over my body when I do calligraphy and when I turn off all the electronics in my studio and I I Sit down at that desk and dip my pen. It's like when I first sit in my kayak in the water and just get this feeling comes over me of peace that I'm in the right place and That's mostly why calligraphy is fun for me. It's very comfortable And it's a comfortable place for me to be it's meditative and God knows it's terribly challenging. So so all of that I find fun what Come over here. What first made it fun for me was Rush did I do this right? Oh I Like the order of letters. I like the the known structure This is before I even became a calligrapher when I first what first drew me to calligraphy was The clean design of letters that I saw this was in the 1960s We didn't have so much abstract now as we do But I loved the hand-painted signs in the grocery stores letters Just it was a known entity to me entity to me and and I find a balance and and sound design in letters and beauty in the craft of making them and Some of these old examples will probably reflect that sense of order and clean solid design this is There we go This is a humanist hand from the 15th century that you might think looks a lot like Times-Roman, but this is a hand-done document that was done five six hundred years ago And here's a detail of that that Structure and clean line still attracts me. I'm still terribly obsessed with trying to create a good solid humanist hand Something else that you that attracted to me to it is The way that it's taught in the way that we see letters We break those little shapes down into many angles many widths and and relationships between height and and stroke width and such and this is a Blackboard from Edward Johnston who is the modern father of what we might say Modern calligraphy, but I guess since the digital age weren't a new modern calligraphy, but he was a great influence for just about any Western calligraphy artist And in a sense of fun I could list many many people who influenced me and I think I don't have an image here But one of San Francisco's best that influenced me was Alan Blackman when I was a kid I started seeing his envelopes and I just thought it was the funnest thing in the world I unfortunately don't have any of his work, but he's a great San Francisco calligrapher From a sense of fun. This is Irene Wellington She was I believe a student of Edward Johnston She lived in the mid 20th century in England and there's a beautiful book called more than Fine writing about her life and her work, and I found a lot of fun in her work It's movement Another one of the same era a little bit later is Anne Heckel And heckle. I just these two British ladies I could give you hundreds of examples of influences, but I called out two that I think are particularly on the fun side so And then also something that's often neglected when we think about what makes What has brought our calligraphy forward is what was going on in the United States in the 19 late 18th 19th and early 19th century and this is some great illustrative and fun pointed pen lettering here the Penmans compared with With constructed letters the art journal and the illustration these were influences of mine as well and As a child how many times did I write coca-cola? Frank Mason Robinson designed that So when I was 12 years old I got the speedball lettering book and kit and that's what started it for me And it's been fun ever since I'm known a little bit in the calligraphy world for this job I had which from a calligraphy standpoint was not fun It's An interesting job to go to the White House and do this is a great honor, but I have to say it's a production job and I did this for a long while and I tried to put as much fun into it and design as I could and That was a big fun part of it. I would design Menus and really try to incorporate as much art as I could in those menus to reflect the nature of the event And that was fun for me But The deadlines and the turnaround you really have to You have to compromise your craft when you have deadlines like that so Those are some of the fun pieces for that So here's a state dinner from Mexico using two languages and images from the Mexican flag so After I get sick of not having fun doing that calligraphy I left the White House and I dedicate my work primarily to nature I Celebrate nature in as many ways as I can with my work and I immerse myself in it And it has certainly made my work a lot of fun This is inspired by hiking the entire Pacific Crest Trail and this piece of art has all the elevation changes of the PCT from Mexico to Canada Another one inspired by that adventure is a Mary Oliver poem called Sleeping in the Forest and This is just playing and playing with letters and to get to a piece like this Will sometimes take me as many as 40 tracings on tracing papers oftentimes pretty close to completion so that whole process of Conceiving a piece reading a poem reading a piece of literature Hiking on it kayaking on it stewing designing in my mind and interpreting those words and then taking it to paper that that whole process I just find incredibly enlivened and This is one that's created from a kayaking trip from Cape Cod to Canada and back With there was little gold leaf at every island that we slept on along the way my wife and I so Here's an example of what I might go through and interpreting a piece This is a Robert Frost poem Called once upon the Pacific and it was inspired by Robert Frost wrote it inspired by a terrible storm here in San Francisco while he's watching his dad swim out in the bay so I took this poem and I interpreted this way with no enland letters It's about a 30 inch long piece of calligraphy and I didn't like it It didn't capture it at all so it all the way back to the beginning Same poem different interpretation Same process, you know, try and try and try and again. It didn't quite match what I wanted so three entirely different directions on the same pole this for me is the fun of calligraphy these days for me and Oftentimes having the text Dictate the medium, you know, I've never worked in acrylic paint since I was in high school But this piece a storm always awakens whatever passion there isn't me I really wanted to sling some heavy stuff around and get some texture So the piece drove me to work with acrylics. It's kind of fun And here's another one Inspired by a new series I'm doing that celebrates the work of John Muir writing of John Muir and Trying to capture Yosemite Valley between the words This particular piece John Muir was lamenting humans building all these Institutions and medicines and and religions for to heal to cure our ills where really it just requires Getting back into nature And then living on Cape Cod I had all this sand to work with and On the internet. I was introduced to Andrew van der Muir. He's a South African calligrapher Who is exceptional at this beach carving stuff that? He's the only one that I've seen do this sort of stuff. So I tried to replicate it Excuse me through Through carving letters into the sand and leaving no debris behind it's an interesting texture And then when I moved out here to San Francisco three years ago I was introduced to Andreas Amador a bay area artist who's well known for his beach art of massive scale and I said well, I've got to do this with with calligraphy and Here's how it goes So I found that to be so interesting to my whole life done these quarter inch half inch letters and all of a sudden bring it to a 10-foot scale and It woke it woke me up to this full-body movement dance thing And that was a pretty tightly constructed italic letter But if you want to jump into I do all different letters with these things and some of it's faster and Freer than others and it's a just an incredible calligraphy experience. And here's the very first piece. I ever did In that genre, I was still living on the east coast and to do this sort of art. The Sun has to be behind the The art or it won't show up. So in Cape Cod that requires you wake up at 3 in the morning on the right tide day And do your work in the dark as the tides are going out And Here's another piece here on the west coast of That I'm working on a full quarter mile long poem along the edge of the surf So this work as I get more and more involved in nature and I do this John Muir thing I realize you can't do an exhibit on John Muir without wood and stone so I'm starting to Experiment a little bit with with wood as well So I'm finding more and more that the work dictates the medium the work dictates where I'd bring myself and This show was no exception having been a Persian linguist at one point in my life I'm really connected to this show. I don't think our governments do a particularly good job They're bringing us together, but culture certainly does so I Jumped into the Persian world for this exhibit and created that It's a beautiful poem by Saadi called I am man and it celebrates the connectedness of humanity and Here's another reason I like doing calligraphy is I get commissions that have beautiful words and this is one Thank you