Most museums wouldn’t think of inviting a living calligrapher, they only want the dead ones. He has two more years left on the bible he’s working on. He has spent his whole life doing something that most people don’t think that they want.
But people realyl do, when htey find something that they need to say in a different way. When you make something essentially for yourself, and then you put it out there, and it has an ability to connect in a way that type does not, no matter how bueatiful.
When he was watching the violinists earlier, he wasn’t watching the violins or the bows, he was watching the feet. That’s where the music starts.
Calligraphy can channel energy, it’s polite, it’s wedding invitations. Not many people come across it in your everyday life. Why would you have a wedding invitation written by hand? He said, it’s when you want to show someone you care about them. It’s about expressing a feeling. What does that say about our society that only on the level of wedding invitations that we employ that level.
He fell in love when he was little boy with calligraphy. He fell in love with a bottle of red ink, a pen point, and a pen. His aunt gave it to him in desperation to stop this kid from rampaging around the place. (Why did she think red ink was going to help the situation. ;))
You can have “cute” calligraphy, he draws a very loopy B on the board. It’s great for engraving, but you couldn’t read a bible in that type.
He wants everyone to make a letter in the air. Just like a violin, you can put a motion into a graphic art, and it stays there. Everyone just did the Reinassance A, it’s like typographic yoga.
If he was in the Middle East and was a Torah scribe, everyone would know his job, because he was dealing with the sacred. Same for the Koran. In the West, it’s actually something servants do, lawyer’s clerks do, notaries, except when it comes to cerimonial work. There are more people writing invitations at the White House than at Buckingham Palace… there are none at Buckingham Palace. You’re just happy enough to get the invitation! He’s showing some examples of the things he gets commissioned to do.
The Entertainment Gathering 