Curator’s Statement: Creating Words, Creating Worlds

Jonathan Homrighausen 

“Form,” wrote Jewish-American artist Ben Shahn, “is the very shape of content.” Though best known for his murals and illustrations, Shahn was no stranger to calligraphic and lettering arts himself, having created several books of Hebrew and English lettering in the latter part of his career. His statement serves as the guiding principle for this virtual exhibit. Each of these fifteen pieces, all by living artists, is a calligraphic interpretation of a text sacred to Jews, Christians, or both. Each artist has pondered their chosen text, explored it inside and out, and provided their own rendition of it—their own ‘translation’ into visual form.

Typically an essay on calligraphy opens with the word’s Greek etymology: “beautiful writing.” But this phrase fails to capture the diversity and complexity of this artform. The calligraphic world contains multitudes. Different languages and scripts have their own aesthetics and traditions: Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and of course, the Roman alphabet, to name a few. Even within the Roman alphabet, different schools have emerged: the pointed-pen writing masters who gave us Copperplate and Spencerian scripts, the British broad-edge nib revival started by Edward Johnston amid the Arts & Crafts movement of the early twentieth century, styles of lettering inspired by graphic design and sign-painting, and so forth. These are not warring factions, but deep wells, drawing upon an underlying stream. Today’s artists dip their pens—or quills, or reeds, or brushes, or even toothpicks—in many wells.

Nor is calligraphy only about beautiful writing. It is the very shape of content, and calligraphers play with content in very different ways. At one extreme, a scribe might see himself as a ‘servant of the text’. Such a servant would use layout, spacing, and letterform to divulge the treasures of the original text. Such a philosophy is at home within the worlds of craft and graphic design, in which artistic vision is coupled with a sense of fitness of utility. Here, form serves content.

At the other end, a calligrapher may consciously also make legibility the least crucial part of her work. In the view of Thomas Ingmire, a main proponent of this view, the forms of the letters should seduce the viewer so thoroughly that the content, the meanings of the words, fall to a distant second. Inspired by East Asian calligraphy and American abstract expressionism, this type of calligraphy becomes an exploration of line, texture, pattern, rhythm, and gesture. This school of thought, like Johnston’s, has its roots in medieval Europe. Here, form becomes its own content.

Every piece in this exhibit represents a preference for the middle of these two extremes. All are legible, though some may demand a closer look. All represent an artist visually grappling with their chosen text, translating it into their visual medium.  

As the title of this exhibit suggests, the way in which calligraphers “paint with words” parallels other ways of playing with form and content. Each of the invited essays explores this analogy from the vantage point of another linguistic form. Devon Abts, a specialist in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, shows how calligraphers Sheila Waters and Diane von Arx draw on Hopkins’s unique sense of rhythm and sound. Lucinda Mosher, an Anglican theologian and liturgical musician, reflects on calligraphic settings of texts used in Christian liturgy as they relate to the many musical settings of those texts. My own essay, written as a specialist in the Hebrew Bible, shows how the forms of biblical Hebrew poetry echo through their calligraphic settings in Hebrew and English.

Why sacred texts? The theme—calligraphic form and content—could be explored through many avenues, such as contemporary poetry. But I am a scholar of religion. These are the words I know. These are also hallowed words, words that have been explored repeatedly, over centuries, in many different forms.

To get the most out of this exhibit, I invite you to spend some time not focusing on the words of each piece. Begin, perhaps, with the pieces not in English: Angelopolous’s piece in Greek, and the Hebrew ones by Borshevsky, d’Anastasio, Pludwinski, and Wolf-Prusan. If near-sighted, you might take off your glasses and stand far enough away to see the lines and shapes, but not be able to read the letters. Another tip: turn the image upside-down. Try to mentally trace the piece in your mind’s eye. What motions was the scribe making? What emotions was the scribe feeling? Are the lines vigorous and rapid, or slow and controlled?

This exhibit comes ten years after the completion of The Saint John’s Bible, often called “America’s Book of Kells”—a calligraphed and illustrated manuscript of the entire Catholic Bible. This monument of sacred text and artistic vision brought the underappreciated artform of Roman-alphabet calligraphy to whole new audiences (including me). It has inspired poetry, scholarship, and even quilts. It has also propelled me into the rich intersection between contemporary lettering arts and sacred text. This selection of pieces is my invitation for you to enter this world. Whether you are an observant Jew, a follower of Christ, or a calligrapher fascinated by words and letters, I hope this exhibit brings you joy and insight. May it form you.

Jonathan Homrighausen
Duke University and Wesley Theological Seminary
August 2021

Jonathan Homrighausen, a doctoral student in Hebrew Bible at Duke University, explores the intersection of biblical literature and its reception in the arts—especially calligraphy and lettering arts. He is the author of Illuminating Justice: The Ethical Imagination of The Saint John's Bible (Liturgical, 2018), Set Me as a Letterform: The Saint John’s Bible, the Song of Songs, and The Word Made Flesh (Liturgical, forthcoming), and articles in Religion and the Arts, Image, Teaching Theology and Religion, Transpositions, and Visual Commentary on Scripture. He is currently preparing a dissertation on Esther scrolls, visual storytelling, and the meanings of writing.

Further Reading:

Ben Shahn quote is from Shahn, The Shape of Content (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 53. On Shahn’s lettering, see Shahn, Love and Joy about Letters: About Letters and Lettering (New York: Grossman, 1963); Shahn, Alphabet of Creation (New York: Schocken, 1954).

On the various global traditions of calligraphy, see Christopher Calderhead and Holly Cohen, eds., The World Encyclopedia of Calligraphy: The Ultimate Compendium on the Art of Fine Writing—History, Craft, Technique (New York: Sterling, 2011).

Some historical surveys of Roman-alphabet lettering can be found in Ewan Clayton, The Golden Thread: A History of Writing (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2014); Nicolete Gray, A History of Lettering: Creative Experiment and Letter Identity (Boston: David R. Godine, 1987); Michelle P. Brown and Patricia Lovett, The Historical Sourcebook for Scribes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and Patricia Lovett, The Art and History of Calligraphy (London: British Library, 2017).

On Hebrew calligraphy, see Ada Yardeni, The Book of Hebrew Script: History, Palaeography, Script Styles, Calligraphy & Design (London: British Library, 2002); Leila Avrin, “Modern Hebrew Calligraphy,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, 2008; Susan Vick and Marc Michael Epstein, “Illuminating the Present: Contemporary Jewish Illumination,” in Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. Marc Michael Epstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 229–54; Izzy Pludwinski, Mastering Hebrew Calligraphy (Jerusalem: Koren, 2012).

On Edward Johnston and the idea of ‘servant of the text,’ see, e.g., Edward Johnston, Formal Penmanship and Other Papers (New York: Pentalic, 1977), 141–45.

On Ingmire, see Thomas Ingmire, ed., Codici 1: Volume One, 2003 (San Francisco: Scriptorium Saint Francis, 2003); Ingmire, Codici 2: Calligraphic Visual Communication Research (San Francisco: Scriptorium Saint Francis, 2021).

Some useful starting-points on gesture and movement among contemporary Roman-alphabet calligraphers are Ewan Clayton, The Calligraphy of the Heart (Brighton, England, 1996); Gina Jonas, Calligraphy as Art and Meditation: A New Approach (St. Augustine, FL: Calligraphic Arts Press, 2019); Denis Brown, Brown Calligraphy: Denis Brown Discusses His Art (Dublin: Quill Skill Publishing, 2017).

For medieval precedents to Ingmire’s focus on design over readability, see Nicolete Gray, Lettering as Drawing (New York: Taplinger, 1982).

The phrase “painting with words” comes from Donald Jackson, Painting with Words: The Calligraphy of Donald Jackson (St. Paul, MN: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1988).

On calligraphy and contemporary poetry, see, e.g., Frye Art Museum and Letter Arts Review, Celebrating American Poetry: An Exhibition of Contemporary Letter Arts (Seattle: Frye Art Museum, 1998); Bruce Nixon, ed., Things That Dream: Contemporary Calligraphic Artists’ Books / Cosas Que Suenan: Libros de Artistas Caligraficos Contemporraneos (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Libraries, 2012).

I have been inspired in part by an exhibit curated by calligrapher Peter Halliday: Holy Writ: Modern Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Calligraphy (Lichfield: Lichfield Cathedral, 2014).