I have finished composing my Art Nouveau lettering model from Ver Sacrum, I still have to work on a few decorative elements but, in the meantime, I am practicing a bit by preparing the workshop certificates for Montreuil Bellay.
I will propose a workshop on this Art Nouveau lettering in my workshop in April, the weekend of the 4th & 5th. If you are interested, you can already contact me to register.
The winter sun is sometimes annoying when I work in my workshop, so my wife made me a curtain.
But I can’t leave a fabric of this surface untouched! I have to scribble on it!
And as I didn’t know which text to use, I fell back on pangrams in several languages.
The advantage is that it will give my trainees ideas when they take calligraphy classes in the workshop and don’t know what to write.
I’m only at the beginning, I started with a pangram in English and in NEULAND.
I continued with a German version in Gothic fraktur…
the next one will be a French version, soon…
I found, at the bottom of my medicine cabinet, an old (over 30 years old) bottle of aqueous eosin. It’s a bit too transparent for my taste to be used as is, but here’s an example of the (amazing) result when you drop a bit of eosin in iron gall ink still wet.
I’m fascinated by the fluorescent green, it’s quite unexpected.
At least, that’s what my wife claims (her background as a framer probably had something to do with it). To please her, I wrote this sentence on a kraft strip stuck on the door of her workshop.
And since it made me want to write in NEULAND (tampering with it a bit, I admit), I started the calligraphy, on kraft, of a fragment from L’été by Camus.
A beautiful text by Colette on the act of writing from La Vagabonde.
It’s only a fragment, she talks about it in different ways, but it’s the one that caught my attention the most.
Who knows, maybe I’ll calligraphy the rest another day?
I was very influenced by Rudolf Koch in this composition, first with the title in NEULAND, then with the gothic script, inspired by the one found in his book of signs.
And, to contrast, I have chosen a less “violent” humanistic script for the second part of the text.
Among the authors I like, there is Eric Vuillard. And among the books he wrote, I particularly appreciated La tristesse de la terre (The Sadness of the Earth). Here is a fragment of it.
I first wrote the text on standard paper before transferring with white carbon paper on a black background, then I touched up the outline of the letters and added the decoration with watercolour.
I wanted to keep the idea of the snowflake, so the text is not very readable, I give it back to you in an approximative translation: “How delicate a snowflake is! It seems like a tired little secret, a lost, inconsolable sweetness.”
If that’s not pure poetry, I’ll eat my hat.
Some have pointed out to me (rightly) that I calligraphy almost exclusively male authors. For a change, here is a fragment from the novel Les Personnages by Sylvie Germain.
I made the three O’s with a bit of a crate immersed in very thick walnut stain, the rest of the writing is a small humanistic made with more diluted stain.
When I returned from Canada yesterday, I couldn’t resist the paper offered to me by Cynthia, one of my students, and I went back to my work desk.
A very beautiful handmade paper, very flexible, what else can I do but emboss it?
Impatient, I didn’t take the time to find a text that could have taken place on this page, I just made an alphabet inspired by the NEULAND script.
And as I had to be able to discreetly add my signature, as there was still a lot of space at the bottom of the sheet, I made some filigrees (yes, I am an addict, but you already knew that).
