Happy 2012!  This promises to be a big year for hand-lettering - Maybe the biggest since the beginning of our demise back in the 1450s!  I begin the year by preparing for a presentation and show of new work at Morris-Jumel Mansion in Manhattan.  Morris-Jumel Mansion is a beautiful colonial home with great historical significance. Visit them at: http://www.morrisjumel.org/ I will be demonstrating 18 and 19th century scripts and tools while enjoying a masquerade ball featuring fine chocolates!  In celebration of Valentine's Day, I will be posting new work on love throughout the month.  Do you have a special poem or quote that you would like written for your loved one?

They Who Possess the Sea by Marguerite Janvrin Adams

After a season of travel and adventure, it is good to be back home again, setting up the studio and putting on paper pieces that I had sketched and imagined throughout the summer.  Ideas for new, exciting pieces are stacked, literally and figuratively, in my mind and on scraps of paper all over my studio!  They Who Possess the Sea, a beautifully imaginative and strong poem, by Marguerite Janvrin Adams, written in many colors of gouache on Canson paper is a good beginning!

The Cape Cod Calligraphers Guild is back in action, with our second meeting of the year taking place this Saturday.  We will be forming a guild committee to split responsibilities and enhance growth and participation. We will also be discussing plans for our first public show as a group, to be held next March at the Mass Audubon Society's Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.

Teaching is also off to a good start.  I am offering a beginner/refresher calligraphy course from my home studio, to begin on Tuesday, October 11.  I am also presenting a lecture and three workshops at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in October and November, and another lecture and workshop at the University of Kentucky on October 20 and 21. 

The seasons keep rolling on by—as I am catching up on pieces inspired by summer activities, I find myself realizing that it's already time to start designing my Christmas card!  So much writing, so little time!

It's been two months now since Julie and I returned from the trail.  Our waning injuries only token reminders now, of the wonderful miles walked together through the heat of desert, the raging rivers of the High Sierras and the cold, persistent wet of the Pacific Northwest.

I've been back in the studio for two months now, and living fully the process of re-gaining technique skills, sharpening design and lettering skills and "feeling" the muse of our five month walk through the wilderness.  When walking such great distances in the wilderness, one's mind is known to wander where it will.  My mind wandered often to calligraphy and painting.  I looked with new interest and focus at light, color and texture.  I squinted, I stared, I speculated as to how I would set out to portray the grandeur of what we were experiencing in my art.  Thomas Moran, I am not, but the voice of the wilderness is just as loud within me as it was him!  Most importantly, I felt, and I breathed in what I was experiencing.  I take that feeling with me into my art, and try to conjure up the texture of the meaning of the words I write to meet the sympathies of those words.  A process that takes me in many directions, calligraphically speaking, and challenges me daily.

New works, inspired by the trail, along with my existing collection of words of the sea, will be introduced to a national audience this coming February at the BMAC (Buyer's Market of American Craft) show in Philadelphia.  If you find yourself in Philly, or with nothing else to do between Feb 17 and Feb 21, please come on by the Philly Convention Center and visit us at booth #1919!

 As if preparing for a national show isn't enough, I am also waist-deep in launching Cape Cod's long-awaited calligraphy guild.  The Cape Cod Calligrapher's Guild is to hold its first meeting on Saturday, February 5, 2011 from 10:00 until noon at the Harwich Community Center.  Come on by and share in the dynamic world of calligraphy as we set the course of our newly formed group.

 Well, amigos, that's a whole heap of stuff for one visit!  With any luck, I'll take to this blogging thing and add a word or two as things develop.

Holiday Cheers!

For my entire professional career, I have seen the steady demise of the practical application of hand-lettering. While I believe there is a certain loss here, it is nevertheless true and inevitable in this digital age, what with all of its beautiful fonts and ease of self-publication. However, while there lies a dark cloud in front of every silver lining, I choose to cast my eyes on the rainbow on the other side of the sky! In my three years since leaving the White House, I have experienced only too personally, the decline in the demand for calligraphy for social events.The blessing here is that it has allowed me to return to my calligraphy roots, and invest my efforts in creating calligraphy-based art purely for the means of expression. 

I have gathered the many quotes and poems that have appealed to me over the years and I am interpreting them on paper in ways that, hopefully, readers will find creative, expressive and as meaningful to them as they are to me. Most of my current work is inspired by words of the sea and of nature. As the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century was a response to the industrialization of the developing world, I find it important to once again check our souls and remember who we are and where we are headed in the midst of our technology-driven society.

With the exponential rate of change we are currently experiencing, it is very easy for us to forget almost entirely our relationship with the natural world in which we live.  I embrace the words of naturalists and thinkers more erudite than myself by putting their words to paper as a reminder of what is important. Please check back from time to time, as I will periodically post new work and writings that I find significant and worthy of contemplation!