Calligraphy.

Some say that calligraphy is an art for fools. Probably because they imagine it's just a matter of learning laboriously how to write an e or a t following a model ? Why not as soon liken music to practicing scales, dance to barre exercices, or litterature to grammar, then... As you can write without being a writer, practicing calligraphy doesn't make you a calligrapher, and indeed I never was.

This is definitly no false modesty : creating a calligraphy that is "self-sufficient" requires a lightness in the gesture and a quickness I never really had. In fact, the same quickness I envy to... street taggers. Even though what spurts out of their paint bombs is not always wonderfuly aesthetic, most of the tags have a kind of rythm, and some of them even remind me of arabic calligraphy.

In fact, the calligrapher that inspired me the most was Hassan Massoudy : I attended to one of his conferences in 1993 or 1994, and I was really stunned by his talent, kindness and attention to every little detail. Such calligraphies make sense even if you don't speak the language they're written in, but I finally had classic arabic courses at university for a year (long ago, now...), just for the pleasure of understanding his work a little better.

I wouldn't like to give the impression that calligraphy only brought me the frustration of not having an agiler hand. I always found a lot of pleasure in the simple gesture of writing, and I even feel like I found my own way with calliphotographies.

A few examples (click to enlarge).

Yik, hard to see years after that poster I created in 1994 for a play. Hard because I had no computer at that time, only paper, ink and glu. I was very happy to do that, but gosh, I'm horrified by the writing !

On turquoise blue nepalese paper and white ink. The quotation is from Gaston Bachelard.

This was made for a calliphotographie illustrating "spring" for a contest in 1998.