I had an experience last week that I thought was worth sharing. I was at a social gathering held in conjunction with a nationally known art show, and struck up a conversation with an interesting couple from out of town. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned that I was a calligrapher as well as a painter.
What a response I got from that statement! They shared that they too were calligraphers. I was pleased and excited to meet two new calligraphers, and asked them what hands they knew and were accustomed to using.
The husband mentioned the names of several hands that were unfamiliar to me, and I was puzzled, because I thought I was fairly well acquainted with most of the traditional Western calligraphic hands. Then it dawned on me that he was giving me the names of computer fonts!
It turns out that these people were so starved for the written word, created by the human hand, that they were looking at computer fonts that appealed to them, printing them out, and trying to re-create them with the edged pen! Neither of them had any formal training in calligraphy, nor did they know any of the thousands of calligraphers world-wide. And yet they were so motivated that they were happily re-inventing calligraphy!
I was amazed and awestruck, andI lost no time in telling them how they could find calligraphy guilds and teachers in their area, and I’m pretty sure that as soon as they arrived home, they got on the computer and googled ‘Calligraphy Guilds’. I hope the calligraphic community will soon be welcoming two new members!