the Art of Calligraphy
I spent a Saturday sitting at a table writing, and rewriting, and rewriting letters. Not love letters, or anything of the sort, but the letters of the alphabet. This is not exactly what you would call a typical Saturday for me — well, not typical of any day for that matter.
It has been a while since I picked up a calligraphy marker or a fountain pen; I was formally introduced to calligraphy in my high school Fine Arts class. Since then, I have kept my pen and ink and picked it up to make the occasional card more fancy.
It was not until shortly after I joined the Innovation Team at the Government of New Brunswick that I discovered graphic facilitation. I saw art, creativity, and visual representation of information being valued and practiced, not just confined within a classroom.
Shout out to the awesome group of people at Brave Space, based in Atlantic Canada, who provide creative services tailored to support participatory methods for leading social change (and are skilled at graphic facilitation)! (http://bravespace.ca/)
This lead me to explore a bit more and I ended up signing up for a calligraphy workshop taught at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. We began the day by practising basic cursive writing and progressing to more complicated fonts, and experimenting with different writing instruments. The participants of the workshop had different day jobs and various levels of calligraphy; some showed up with nothing (me), and others showed up with their own easel and fountain pens. I learned two things that I did not know before, but am not super surprised after hearing: there is an annual international calligraphy conference, and that one can obtain the title of Master Penman. If you are interested in learning more about the latter, you can watch the following video featuring Master Penman Jake Weidmann here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvSyQDu49pI
I should note at this time that this post is about my personal reflections, thoughts, and musings after participating in this workshop at this particular time, and is in no way some big declaration of ground-breaking ideas.
What I found interesting was a brief conversation among the workshop participants about how penmanship influences a person’s perception of you; the opinion that a person with impeccable writing is superior in some way. This can suggest that the way someone writes somehow reflects the character of that person. More generally speaking, the way a piece of text looks, whether by hand or a chosen font, shapes the way people feel and can be used to convey more than just what the words say.
Some of the conversations floating around during the workshop was about how cursive writing is no longer being taught at schools in New Brunswick. I feel that cursive writing opens up different ways of self-identification and contributes to a person’s style; then I thought about signatures. Signatures, an almost sacred bond to the individual, so valued that the penalty for forgery of a signature in Canada is up to 10 years incarceration. Will eliminating cursive writing limit the different ways signatures can be signed? Signatures serve many purposes, such as signifying that we have read this particular thing. Arguably, it has been somewhat replaced by the click of a box online, to signify that we agree to particular Terms and Conditions.
Not going to lie, it made me uneasy to be spending so much time just sitting at a table and writing these letters over and over again, as if there could be something better I could be doing with my time. But there is something about being in a space and being held in the moment by putting pen to paper. This is something that some people often actively seek out.
It seems to be the ongoing and unanimous belief that with artificial intelligence and technology, things like calligraphy, in the way that we know it today, will be rendered obsolete.
Surely, there can be some software that can take in a verbal conversation and put out some visual representation of it (if this does not already exist), which is partly what graphic facilitation is. When we talk about specifically about work that puts people at the heart of it, however, such as social innovation and participatory methods, there is something to be said about people working with people for people, and the nuances that result because of this. So how will this type of work evolve as technology evolves? Your guess is as good as mine.
Maybe handwriting was originally born to fulfill this desire to remember and exchange people’s ideas and thoughts, and perhaps, as we move through this technological age, it will continue to exist in the far future for different purposes outside of this necessity. Perhaps handwriting will exist because it fulfills different desires for people: to feel reconnected with the self, as an art form — a cherished skill of a particular subset of people with the purpose of creating something solely as a form of self-expression.
Who knows what will happen, but for the time being, the art of calligraphy is still here, and I’m going to keep enjoying it.
