Developing Meaning

I spent last week up at Calligraphy Northwest held at Reed College in Portland, this year’s edition of the largest calligraphy conference taking place in North America, with 500 participants. Workshops ran 2 1/2 days and 5 days; I took a 5 day course entitled “Developing Meaning” taught by Brody Neuenschwander, which was an exhilarating workshop on improving the textual content of our calligraphy works. Prior to the workshop we had a homework assignment to write three short texts about a significant recent event in our lives, something that shook us to the core. I ended up choosing the pepper spray incident from last November. We used these texts initially for a series of calligraphic riffs and wrote these on good paper to be bound into a book. Towards the end, we started writing out the texts in full into the books. I don’t think anyone completed this task during the class, and I’m still working on writing in the texts. Here are a couple of images from my book in progress.