The Beauty of Lettering

Travels combined with dissertation research has given me an appreciation for the beauty of lettering. It is particularly striking when you go to a country or a experience a language with an entirely different alphabet. The inability to recognise these forms or read them leads to an appreciation of their form and music alone. Letters contain an inherent beauty in their function, and Eric Gill certainly approved of this. Here are a few photographs to stir your own interest. In China I saw a few examples of people writing on the streets in water, it is still a mystery to me why they were doing it, although I like to imagine it was spontaneous park-poetry! Above you can see a calligrapher in the Temple of Heaven park and below in Beihai Park, Beijing.
Unfortunately in this picture you can see the spots of rain threatening to erase the whole work of art and labour before its time. But this poetry has to be fast and fleeting because in the heat of Beijing it quickly disappears. Words in to air without a trace.
In Marrakech I discovered an appreciation for the incantatory forms of Arabic lettering, mysteriously marking walls and the sides of buildings. I experience these letters as the deaf do, blind to the richness of intonation and suggestive meaning, left soothed by their most basic aesthetic appeal and grasping nothing more.
There is a kind of magic to these unexplained letters, perhaps they are as mundane as road signs and shop fronts, but while I don't understand and can't know the answers they hold all the power in the world.

A little research has yielded an answer to the mystery of water-park-calligraphy in China; http://www.thememagazine.com/stories/yang-yingshi/

It seems my instinct wasn't so far off when I guessed it might be poetry, but this isn't intended as performance art, but just practice! Just another example of why parks in Beijing are so beautiful, hives of afternoon activity.

'between poetry and painting'

More reflections on the Dissertation, I hope they seem interesting. These are inscriptions from David Jones' long poem The Anathemata, they are all made by a similar process using watercolours, gouache, ink and sometimes crayon. With quotations from the Latin Mass, Rome and even Finnegan's Wake they represent the breadth of the referential network, of the 'vast wooded Quarry' from which Jones takes inspiration and direction.

'For by the mystery of the Word made flesh the light of thy brightness has shone anew into the eyes of our mind Minerva has sprung from the head of Jove.'

The Inscriptions appear to us as relics which the poet may have unearthed from a burial site or discovered and done a rubbing of. They are just one of the material forms which the poem takes in an attempt to collapse the boundaries and distinctions between the literary and the visual, between the word and its physical manifestation. Ultimately the poem moves towards this action of making 'the Word flesh'.

This inscription is taken from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake; the highlighted words link 'thing' with 'place' so that every object is tied with its locality but also every object embodies its 'place'.

The Letters do not follow a strict pattern or formation but are separate entities in themselves, designed by an artist to fit their purpose, their meaning, their place within the word and in order to communicate their particular message.

‘To my parents and their forebears, and to all those indigenous, the whole family for the fair island of the Britons.’

They are the stone markers in our journey through the history of our culture, through the history of the world; suggesting direction and our own stumbling upon significance.

Text from a lost inscription put up by Pope Leo IV over a gate in the Vatican Wall, ‘Rome head of the world, its splendour and hope, golden Rome.’ –‘

Really what these show is the scope of literature to be more far more active than just words on a page. These words have physical presence and they also begin to map out a typography of reference and cultural foundations.

I LOVE Paula Rego

Here's a little tribute!

These are some sketches in biro that I did a fairly long time ago now of some of Paula Rego's work. If you know anything about modern art you will have heard of Rego, her work is powerful and bold, so that modern women painter's must all struggle in her emasculating shadow. She recently had a show in London called The Oratorio (I wrote a short post about it in July), but I still hold out hope that she will be back for a retrospective exhibition at some point. I would love to see all her work, which I spent so much time with during A-levels, in the flesh.

Looking at these sketches makes me really miss drawing, I wonder when I will get the chance to do my own art again or if I am destined to just spend my life with other people's (not that this is a terrible thought at all!)

Chinese Vogue- 5th anniversary September Issue

My blog got a hit from a google search for Chinese Vogue. I was the fourth search result, this excites me a lot but also made me realise how unsatisfying my first post may have been. Here are some sneak peak scans from the issue to satisfy any searches a little more sufficiently. Here is a sneak peak at some of the pages inside the issue, remember you can click on the scans to see a bigger image.

The issue features some gorgeous photoshoots which really explore asian identity and beauty.

This picture reminds me of some of the numerous fabric markets that were dotted around Beijing, in China tailored clothing is affordable to just about any Western tourist as long as they have savvy bartering skills.

This scan shows the full-range of a make-up shoot featured in the magazine, i love the way the chinese characters look on the page.

This scan didn't come out very well, you can still see the rainbow of the laser as it moves across the page. But I couldn't resist trying to show you this page, the black and white photoshoot of female Chinese celebrities is my favourite in the magazine. It really plays with ideas of western elegance and glamour. I think Asian beauty wins out in the end though.

Wu Guanzhong- retrospective

First of all I have to apologise for the extremely cropped scans, it is difficult trying to get good scans whilst protecting the spine of your book! When I was in China I saw a retrospective of the this giant of Chinese Modern Art, Wu Guanzhong. These examples may look like fairly typical of Chinese painting but placing them within the context of the rest of the museum it becomes evident that Guanzhong's delicate diversions from the traditional model make him stunningly modern.

'Exploring in the world of art is just like hunting tigers and panthers in deep mountains or shooting eagles. If they do not catch their preys, both artists and hunters will be greatly depressed and have nothing to fall back on. An artist may use up all of his energy for persistent hunting in the field of art. But his spirit is reviving.' Wu Guanzhong.

Only the Chinese can get away with being quite so imagistically poetic.

After I saw his exhibition I couldn't look at China without seeing it through the lyrical brush strokes of Guanzhong. His paintings have come to represent for me what I love about that country.

It's about time we rediscovered the 90's

A whole decade has past, it is time to rediscover the nineties. All the horror I felt when I looked back at photos of what my mother was dressing me in has dissipated. There is nostalgia and comedy in those memories which convince me that times were better then.

I recently discovered a singer called Mazzy Star. It should probably be termed a 're-discovery' but I was far too young to discover her in the first place. The music is beautiful, like a glass of wine in a wintery warm room, it is just what I need. But the most interesting thing as you search through her videos on youtube are people's comments. All of these memories of being young and happy in the nineties. The nineties has finally gained enough perspective to have developed that golden hue. There was no recession then, no war. That's what everybody writes. Somewhere inside I believe them, why can't I have lived properly through the nineties?

I've got love for you if you were born in the 90's!

My Dissertation- summarised in pictures

This is my dissertation pinboard. Whatever it may suggest, my subject is not Art or Art History, but Literature. The exciting thing about the dissertation is that I am exploring the ways in which literature and art are interconnected, that words themselves can be material objects, can be individual works of art.

From top left to bottom right, a list of the dissertation ephemera;

*A postcard from the Fitzwilliam museum Cambridge of a Neolithic female (David Jones explores the first examples of art in his poem The Anathemata)

*Leaflet from an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts where I first saw work by Eric Gill.

*A post it note reminding me that 'Neo-romanticism' might be an important idea.

*A postcard of the Kettles Yard house, where there are archives of David Jones' letters.

* A quote from Eric Gill 'Beauty is independent of ethical association', to remind me that Gill can still shock me!

*A postcard of Eric Gill's Ecstasy, it is going to be impossible to avoid the subject of sex in my dissertation when it comes to Gill.

*A quote from Paul Klee which expresses a similar theory of Art to that which Jones and Gill preach (I just happened to pick this up in library, but it is excitingly relevant)

*A picture of the Willendorf Venus, another example of early art, early sensual art to be more precise. Jones alludes to the Willendorf in his epic poem...

*A painting by Paul Nash, (the postcard is from the Fitz again) Nash belongs to the same school of artists as Jones, he is using watercolours and the perspective has been flattened.

*An inscription by David Jones...I should have more inscriptional work on my pinboard as this is the heart of the dissertation, 'The word made stone!'

*Another painting by Paul Nash...purely for decorative purposes!

*And finally another quote found in the library from Ralph Waldo Emerson, he also agrees that words can be material objects.

Of course there is a lot more to my dissertation than meets the eye in my collection of images, but the pinboard begins to map out some of my thinking and some of my inspiration!



I am sorry about picture quality, I have been using the camera on my blackberry which is fast, efficient and easy but the photos don't turn out as beautiful as they would with a little more effort. Still they are only here as a little visual aid.