Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to series three of the Life of Letters. I'm Laura Edrilyn, your host and London based calligrapher. Curious about the history and future of letters. This season we're diving back into the rich world of scripts, letter forms, and the stories behind the marks we make on paper and elsewhere.
A massive thank you to Speedball for sponsoring this season of the podcast. It really means so much to us. Not only do we have their Director of Product marketing, Melissa, joining me for an episode this season, but I've been using Speedball tools since my very early days of calligraphy, so their support truly means the world. Enjoy the episode and if you want to find out more about the guest, the podcast, or me, please check out the show notes in today's episode. I'm delighted to be speaking with Paul Antonio. As a calligrapher and heraldic artist, Paul's work focuses on an in depth study into letterforms, both from a paleographical and a geometric perspective. He is also the author of Copperplate A Yin and Yang Approach, possibly best known online as pascribe. Is that correct?
[00:01:10] Speaker B: So it's a PA Scribe Pascalscribe.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Paul runs his calligraphy business from Portugal as an artist, but also selling everything online from digital and physical products to workshops, free resources and communities supporting calligraphy journeys all around the world.
Paul, firstly, a huge welcome to the Life of Letters podcast. I'm so excited to be talking to you today.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Thanks so much. Laura, thanks so much for asking me to come on.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: It's so good, it's so lovely speaking to people all over the world, and especially you, because I've been following your incredible Instagram content and we're going to go through some of the stuff that you share on there, but I wondered whether you can kind of begin by explaining where your interest in calligraphy and letters came from.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: So, you know, I grew up in Trinidad and we have such amazing nature in Trinidad, and I grew up spending a lot of time outdoors and I love plants and animals. And growing up, my brother and I, we kept busy doing things and we would trace letters and fill them in with just like a ballpoint pen.
And then one day he came home and he had done this old English Alphabet.
And I said, wow, what is this? And he said, some new letters that I've discovered. And I was looking at it and I said to him, so I'm about nine here. And I said to him, yeah, but you know, if you had a big pen, you could just make the lines right? And he said, what do you mean? And I Don't know how I could see this.
And so he said, oh, just remember, draw the outline and fill it in. But if you had a big pen you could just.
I didn't know what I was talking about.
And then a couple weeks later a friend of mine said to me, oh, Paul, my mom bought me this set, it's called a calligraphy set. I was like, oh, what's that? He said, yeah, it's really hard to use. And as you like writing, I thought maybe you might like it. And so I was like, okay, okay. So I went over to see him and as soon as I saw it I went, oh, a big pen.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: This is it, this is what I meant.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: And I just, and I got hooked and I just fell in love with it. And of course, you know, Mummy would take us to the museum and I would always notice at the bottom of the, of the botanical and wildlife illustrations, this really beautiful script. And on the maps you had these lovely cartouches filled with flourishing and different types of scripts. And I was fascinated with letters.
And it just started as a child and I stuck with it.
And then I went on to teach at secondary school. I taught at a boys Catholic school and I started to focus on the boys handwriting. And so I ended up running remedial classes in the evenings for well after school from like three to five for boys who were really struggling with the handwriting.
And I was doing bits of calligraphy work in Trinidad for like large corporations.
So I, I, I, I sort of, it's always been in my life, it's always been a big part of my life.
And of course, you know, I'm a quarter Chinese as well. So I grew up seeing and interacting with a lot of Chinese script.
And I was always fascinated that writing was not just these letters that we used, there were other characters that, that conveyed meaning. But you know, I didn't know what they were saying because we didn't learn Mandarin at home. My great grandparents didn't want us to learn to speak Mandarin. They wanted us to integrate into sort of Trinidadian life.
But we grew up seeing this around us. So writing for me has always been really quite fascinating. And you know, Mummy was.
My mom raised the four of us on our own and we were very well behaved kids.
And she would take us to the library and eventually we got to the point where we knew how to deal with the library and we would be very quiet. And so the librarian eventually said to her, you know, if you want to leave them here, they're very well behaved, they're not Going to cause trouble.
You can go off and do things.
And I remember looking up this word on the box, calligraphy in Encyclopaedia Britannica. And you know, you know that full range of encyclopedia set that, you know, you never had one at home because it was so expensive. When I. When I did really well at school, and Mommy said to me, what would you like as your present? And I said, I would love a set of encyclopedia.
And she paid. Every month she bought a book, so she started with a. And then every month this book would come and I'd be like, oh, my whole life would change.
And so I was in the library. I must have been about 10.
And I remember looking up calligraphy, and at the end of the section it said, c, paleography, Egyptian hieroglyphs, blah, blah, blah. And it sort of listed, you know, where the next rabbit hole would be. And I was like, oh, what? Egyptian hieroglyphs? And I remember going to the E section and getting the book off the shelf and opening it and looking for Egyptian. I'm talking. I have goose pimples all over me. And I opened it and I was like, what is this? Oh, my God, this is writing.
These are pictures. And my mind just.
It was on fire.
And so I went to the librarian and I said, oh, what stuff do you have on Egypt? And she was like, how did you find Egypt? I said, here, here, here. And she was great. You know, she was like, wow, this child. And so she gave me a little section of a. A big table and she brought books out in Egypt. And I remember just standing there, looking down at about 10 books, and she was standing right there, and I was like, what is Egypt? And I remember walking home, Egypt, hieroglyphs, and, oh, gods and Osiris. And Mommy was like, what, What. What is wrong with you?
And Egypt and Egyptian hieroglyphs played a really big part of my life until I was about 12. And I thought, you know, I'm growing up in a developing country.
I will never leave Trinidad. I will never get to Egypt.
And so I, you know, I sort of gave away all my books on Egypt, which I'd been buying and saving my money and doing chores for other people and earning money to buy books. And, you know, years later, I ended up working in a pyramid drawing hieroglyphs for the Metropolitan Museum in Egypt. It was just like, oh, it was amazing. So writing for me is not just about these Latin letters that we produce, and it's also about the numbers. When I looked. When I look at writing, I think of writing, I think of these marks that we make which convey meaning.
And they don't necessarily have to be numbers, they don't necessarily have to be letters. And then the numbers have their own magical path, you know, where they evolved from. And you know, these Arabic numbers that came via. That came from India, via Arabia, via the Arabian quarter, and you know, it's 1, 2, 3, 4. It's because of the number of angles in the, in the lines. And you're just like, what?
And that, that's fascinating because they too convey meaning.
And then, you know, as I got older, I started getting into non Latin scripts. Now, of course, things like writing in French is the same set of characters, and then you have diacritics, but then you go to German and you have another set of diacritics, and I love that.
[00:09:00] Speaker A: What's diacritics?
[00:09:01] Speaker B: The marks that you find on top of letters.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: Like the accents?
[00:09:04] Speaker B: Yeah, like accents and cedulas and umlauts and these things that help to alter the sound of the letter. But even simple things like diagraphs where you have like an e conjoined, and that's a technical construct when you're. You're writing. And so, so for me, it's just, how do these things, these marks, convey meaning?
And, you know, even going as far back as, you know, sort of 60,000, 60,000 BC when you find these markings on caves and finger fluting, you know, for years they just thought there were patterns.
Archaeologists, you know, in the Last sort of 15 years have been saying that this is a simplified form of communication. That's writing as well.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: So when you think about cavemen, you're like, oh, yeah, they had no writing and they did.
We just, we're just not able to decipher it. And it's. For me, it's all of that.
You know, calligraphy is a tiny part of that. You know, you have calligraphy, epigraphy, paleography, hieroglyphic writing, Hittite hieroglyphs, Hurrian hieroglyphs, Mayan hieroglyphs, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Aztec hieroglyphs. It's. It's just. It's just phenomenal how much there is to connect these crazy little marks that convey meaning.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Yeah. And the beauty of the world of it. I mean, it's just. It's endless, isn't it? Like, you found the spiral of. Right. I've gone down this rabbit hole, but then there's all of this, and I get to find out all of this.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: You're like, all the other rabbit holes.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: It's endless. I mean, it's fascinating. And such a vast history, which really comes back to kind of that communication and language and all the things that kind of bring us all together, which is a lovely thing to be able to do and to produce and to explore, as I had to Google it. But can you explain what a heraldic artist is and what does that mean in your work?
[00:11:07] Speaker B: So when I left Trinidad, I moved to England and I won a scholarship to study letterform history at Reading.
And Reading really changed my life.
And I met some great people like James Mosley, Michael Harvey and the faculty at Reading.
And, you know, I was like, oh, you know, why are we using fonts? If you want to write something beautifully, you should use calligraphy.
And I learned very early on at Reading that there is a purpose for every type of writing, every type of letter system. And I started to accept that fonts were really an important part of our lives. And then I left.
I finished my year there. It was a year long course.
And then I went, I won another scholarship and I went to Roygate School of Art and Design. And on the course we did calligraphy, heraldic painting and gilding. That was the name of the course. So it was a two year course under Gaynor Gough and Gerald Minot.
We had visiting lecturers that came in and taught different things like sign writing.
We did work on glass on stone. I did tapestry weaving.
I know I had to set up my little. My little.
My little station. And I had everything in. I had this little machine that you would sort of run the shuttle back and forth through.
I did this little textualis quadrata n.
It was crazy.
My little loom.
And I got to try engraving with a burin etching with drypoint. And I did everything I could at this traditional old art school.
And one of the things that was part of the course was heraldic painting. And so you learn to paint coats of arms. And that was a big part of the course because a lot of English signs had heraldry on it.
And so we had to learn the conventions of heraldry which really come through English. English heraldry, which really come through the Norman French. So you had to learn all these old French terms like, like ore for gold and ghouls for red and just argent for silver. And then you had to learn to read the blazoning, which is. You could look at, you know, at a shield with the devices on it, and you could read it into text.
So if you have a shield.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: And then you have an upside down V, that's called a chevron.
And if you divided it into smaller V's, you would have chevronels. And the background of the shield or the field is a color. So if it's ghouls, it's red.
And then if you have these types of birds that are stylized birds called martlets, if you have three martlets in gold on the red field with a chevron, you would say peu. Chevron. And then it's usually a metal or gold on a red field. On a. On a field, ghouls, red field. Three motlets, two in chief. So two at the top, respectant facing each other, and one in base. And so you learn this blazoning, which is amazing, really quite crazy, and just. Just so medieval.
And at the same time, we were learning we could specialize. I decided to specialize in historical materials and techniques, and I wanted to learn to prepare vellum, make gold paint out of gold leaf and grind pigments and cut quills and make iron gall ink. And the sort of craft side of it, the artisanal side of it, was really fascinating for me, and that became my focus through France and that.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: Did you say blazoning?
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:14:49] Speaker A: It sounds like it's sort of tapping into that hieroglyphic, pictorial kind of way of communicating meaning that isn't, as you said earlier, isn't this sort of Latin text or, you know, using an Alphabet system or anything? So it's so interesting that all of these dots are kind of connecting in your own journey.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: And this was the great thing about reading.
James Mosley was absolutely phenomenal as a lecturer. He's one of the most learned people I've ever met.
His knowledge of fonts and the history of type and his ability to connect things.
And, you know, in Trinidad, I read. I just read so much, and I had all these little bits of information in my mind.
And during every Saturday during James's lectures, I would be like, oh, my gosh.
And he would say, what? What? I was like, this does this, and this connects to this. And he goes, yes, yes. And the other students would be like, this guy is crazy.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: You're the dream student. You're helping.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: I had a great time in that class. James took thousands of little bits of disparate information and strung them into seamlessly connected lines.
And it changed my life. It really changed my perception. And it was, of course, on that course, I met Michael Harvey, who has since passed away, who is an amazing letter cutter and a letterer. Michael hated being called a calligrapher.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: Is that not a good term for someone?
[00:16:25] Speaker B: Well, you know, he was not a calligrapher. He was a letter cutter. He cut in stone. He cut, you know, he designed type. Right. And he was. His focus was drawn letter forms.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: And Michael gave us a really interesting lecture, a series of lectures every other month.
He would come in for three days and we would.
He would learn about the practicality of writing.
So he started with the Roman period and we did some letter cutting, we did some Roman caps with large brushes to understand how serifs were formed. And then we moved into uncials and we did some quill cutting and writing on vellum. And then the next session we looked at the Gothic period and you know, Textualis Quadrata and Prisiscus and Fractur and Butard and all of those Gothic scripts. And then the next session we moved into the Renaissance period and then we moved into the Copper English Round Hand period, which then led into the Copperplate period.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: And is that sort of the chronological journey in a nutshell? Yeah, I mean, there's probably a lot.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Going on in between that really affected me. And then Michael stopped teaching.
I had gone, I'd left reading. I'd gone to Reigate. And after Reigate I still had money for my scholarship, so I used it to go to Birkbeck. And I studied English paleography from 600 to 1600, so manuscript reading.
And then I did a year in archaeological illustration. Specialism was historical ancient writing systems. And then I did a 12 week course in Arabic calligraphy where I studied Kufiq and Thuluth, Nusk and Maghribi and some really amazing Arabic scripts. And I stayed at Birkbeck doing other things. Like I did a course at. Did a year long course in Egyptian art and culture. I did a year when I went to Egypt because I went to Egypt because I did this, this archeological illustration course. And I ended up in Egypt because of that. And I came back and I was so fired up. So I went back to Birkbeck and I did a year in Middle Kingdom Egyptian language and translation.
So I learned to read hieroglyphs. And I was like, oh my God, it's like being 10 again. And so the course really.
So the heraldry was a really big part of the Reigate course.
But going into heraldry or becoming an heraldic artist is quite specific. You really have to learn to draw. And my focus as I left art school was because I needed to make money, I needed to live.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: I mean, I was going to ask this a. Are you like 108 years old, because I don't know how you've managed to fit in quite so many courses. But also when you're learning, I think there's always a slight barrier for some people around the financial side unless you're able to have a job. But how you're traveling and learning and absorbing all of these.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: Well, fortunately, the first.
The first scholarship helped me quite a lot. The second scholarship was a bigger scholarship, and so it allowed me to buy tools and materials and live whilst I was reading at Roygate Learning.
And then when I left Roygate, I so remember this was a 2000.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: So I left Reigate and I graduated with the only distinction in my year. I worked like a dog because I would never have been able to do that in Trinidad, and I would never have been able to afford to do. To study. This is one of the reasons I generally offer discounts on my courses when, you know, sometimes I. When I was traveling around teaching, I would always give a full scholarship and a partial scholarship because I know how hard it is to not have money.
You know, when I was growing up, I said to mom, yo, can you buy me these nibs? I remember in Trinidad, you know, the exchange rate when I was growing up was 10 Trinidadian dollars to 1 British pound. So if a nib was 35 pence, it was 350.
And I remember her doing this conversion for me, and she said, you know, Paul, a bottle of beer is 250.
Your nib is more than a bottle of beer, which is, you know, you know, mummy didn't drink, but it's quite a shocking conversion. And she said, I'm really sorry, I cannot. Can't afford this.
I was like, oh, it's okay, don't worry. And, you know, I'd read that there were quills.
So I remember going down to the beach and all these quills. All over the beach we have turkey vultures, which are a little smaller than geese, and their end feathers, when they molt, are large enough to cut into a quill.
But the quills lay on the hot sand in the hot salt water, and so they were naturally cured. So I didn't have to cure them.
I gathered up all these quills and I started learning to cut quills. I cut my fingers quite badly. Quite a lot of times I just learned with what I had because things were too expensive.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:42] Speaker B: And so when I came to Reigate and I did things like I tried to make paper. Mommy nearly killed me because I nearly ruined the blender. And you know, I tried making vellum at home. The stink was, wow. Oh, wow, it reeked. And the things my poor mother had to put up with. I mean, seriously, I tried making ink because I remember thinking, wow, these carrots are really brightly colored. How can you get the color out of the carrots?
Just crazy child. And I was lucky that my mother didn't stop me from exploring things like that. So when I came to Roygate and I had to use gouache for the first time, I always thought that. That, you know, not growing up with money and not being able to afford nibs and inks and paints and paper, I always felt that was a disadvantage.
But when I went to art school, I had this deeper sense and appreciation of tools and materials. I could feel why the material wasn't working, because I had tried to figure this out previously, and it turned into such a huge positive for me whilst I was at art school and afterwards, because I, you know, I fell in love with pigment. Pigment grinding. You know, I have a whole wall of pigments over here.
[00:23:01] Speaker A: It's incredible. But that curiosity has, you know, given you so much as well, right? Because if you weren't that interested in any of this, you wouldn't have gone into such detail and experimented with things and found all these connections. It's brilliant.
It's brilliant.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: I'm trying to keep on track with your questions, but, you know, everything is sort of connected.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: No, it's fine.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: It's like a little spider's web in my life.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: It's great we're journeying through with you. I also see your incredible posts on Instagram that we mentioned earlier, and I think recently you've been sharing some information about your course, and I want to say Cadells. Cadells.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Cadel.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: Cadells. What exactly are Cadells?
[00:23:44] Speaker B: So cadells are Cadell's overlapping interlacing geometric construct where the number of loops has to be less than the number of sharp vertices by about 40%.
So if you have more than 40% loops, the Cadel sort of turns into a flourish.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:24:10] Speaker B: And the word cadel comes from the French cadou, which is. Which means gift. But I could tell you one thing, this is certainly not a gift for your brain.
I fell in love with Cadells in 1998 when I was at Reigate. And I remember I was doing some research on. On letters which work with Gothic scripts, and I came across this thing and I was like, what is this? This?
And obviously I failed at doing it, but it really excited me. And over the years, every two or Three times a year I would sit down and I would go through my album. So every time I saw cadells I would take a photocopy of it or, or I would have it in a book in the library. I collected a huge library. I have a massive calligraphy library. And so I know that through there, through all those books, there are tons of cadels. And so I have masses of information on it. And, and every now and then I would go back to it and I would try to trace the pattern. Halfway through the tracing, the interlacing becomes really complicated and it kind of kicks you out of the tracing.
You're like, oh, what's just happened?
And I never really applied the time to it. So earlier this year I did a complete overhaul on the method that I use for teaching based on my geometric proportioning system.
And whilst I was doing this, I started to see some of the interlacings and I thought, this looks like a cadelic construct right here. I wonder how does this work?
And so I got my Cadel's folder out which had, you know, like, like 600 pages of Cadells.
And so I started going through them, just looking at them to, to input them into my brain.
And I started to understand that there were different systems in which to construct a Cadel. And using this geometric proportioning system that I developed, I was able to separate it out into the different systems whereby you sort of come down, go across, go up at 90 degrees, go across at 90 degrees.
And how do you take that at 90, at 0 and 90 and rotate it to 45 and then compress it.
So it was a really systematic approach. And what I wanted for the students was for them to not trace.
Yeah, I wanted them to feel the pattern and understand how the lines moved.
So it was really interesting sort of getting students who've studied Gothic scripts with me, like Textualis, Quadrata and Fraktur and Batard, to have another way to augment the script.
[00:26:58] Speaker A: Because it's not, it's not. I mean, it is like its own language, isn't it? Because once they've, they've learned the kind of process to it, I guess there is a system to it. But these are these sitting around pieces of work on pages near text. What purpose do they serve? I mean, flourishing can do all sorts of things. Glare, there are text.
[00:27:18] Speaker B: So normally they are written on the top or the bottom line. Okay, so the Majuscules, you use them on, if you look at a block of text, the minuscules might be three or four nib widths. And the Majuscules will probably be two or three times that in a normal bit of batard.
But when you apply cadals or cadalic constructs to the Majuscules, you need to write the majuscules maybe at 6, at 5, 7 or 9 times the x height. So they become huge.
[00:27:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: But they're still quite thin.
And so the Cadel and its geometric overlapping starts to create this. This focal point to attract you to something.
You can add them to ascenders, and you can extend the ascender all the way up, you know, a good sort of 7, 9 or 13x heights above it, skipping gaps and interlacing ribbons and then adding sort of anthropomorphic flourishes with heads and people sticking out their tongues. And the Cadel sort of fits into this. It's so magical. These sort of grotesques that you find in the borders of illuminated manuscripts starting to pepper the ascenders and descenders.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: So they become part of the letters themselves.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Yes. And they also. They can also tell a story.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: So when you have a large initial at the beginning of the text, this is usually an historiated initial. So you have some gilding and some acanthus leaf work and some flourishing.
And inside of the counter space, you'd have a little scene.
And that scene is normally related to what the text is on that page.
Now, you could use the Cadels to tell part of the story.
So the text has a sort of pictorial representation, if you know what you're looking at.
And it makes. It makes. It really makes storytelling quite fascinating because the magic of the imagery is tied to the text that you're writing. And you could even do it in such a way that you could build the imagery in such a way that you're not only making it accessible to people who know something of that story.
So there's so much to it.
When you delve into manuscript illumination and border decoration and sort of grotesques and arabesques and drolleries and how they start to interact with each other, the sort of paleographical side of our craft is really phenomenal. And this is something I want to. I always try to get my students to understand, because understanding how manuscripts work should influence the way that we understand how the text works.
[00:30:11] Speaker A: If you're enjoying this episode and fancy supporting the podcast, you can literally buy us a coffee. Head to the link in the show notes. It's a lovely way to help keep the life of letters going. Thank you. Now, let's get back to the episode.
[00:30:25] Speaker B: So this comes Back to something I was talking about earlier on with Michael Harvey.
So Michael did these four workshops, and then when Michael stopped teaching, I remember I went somewhere and I was talking about, you know, the history of the letters and how we go from Roman scripts into Anchels into into Anglo Saxon scripts and Northumbrian and Southumbrian scripts, which are separate from what's happening on the continent. And then we come into the Carolingian period and then into the Romanesque period, and then into the Gothic period and then into the Renaissance period. And somebody said, do you. Do you do this like a lecture?
Do you do this like one lecture? And I was like, no.
Why. Why can you not do the research yourself?
And people started to see. I wouldn't even know where to start with this research.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:12] Speaker B: And so I sat down and I thought, right, if Michael took 12, 15 days across at four sessions to do this for us, how can I consolidate this down?
And so I. I built this lecture, a lecture demonstration.
So I never showed slides because you didn't have time to talk through the slides and everything. I actually wrote the letters. So, right, so we're starting at 3,500, and we're looking at some cuneiform and some Egyptian hieroglyphs. And then around 1600 BC we have a really good confluence point at Serabet al Kadim, where proto sinatic develops. And out of proto Sinatic, the Phoenicians take it, and they take it into. Into the Mediterranean. And of course, the Etruscans then take it, and the Greeks take that from the Etruscans, and the Greeks then give it to the Romans. And the Romans then have four different scripts. These are scripts because then you have vernacular script written by the armies. And then, of course, that then ends up being Rome falls. And as Rome is falling, torches handed to the people, to the monks in Ireland, and they start with uncials. And then our bilinear scripts devolve or evolve into quadrilinear scripts. And it's at half anchals that we start developing uppercase and lowercase, which are really minuscules. And then it was so amazing.
Just write this for people and wow. And just watch the. Just listen to the room get progressively quieter.
And at the end of it, I would finish and I'd go, right, so that's three and a half thousand years in an hour.
And nobody would say anything. People would just sit there. And then somebody would have to get up and go, okay, so, so, so thank you. Thank you.
Wow. I think we need a break. And people were like, no, no, no, no, no. I have questions, I have questions. And then the questions would come and was really.
And that came because when I left Reigate, I went to Reddit, to Birkbeck, and I studied paleography, but because I also studied Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform, I was able to put that into the mix. And there are other things, you know, I mentioned earlier on about Hittite hieroglyphs and Hurrion and Elabite and Elamite, and these were all kingdoms in the Fertile Crescent, which is, you know, sort of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They all had writing systems. And I was, I was fascinated with how these, these things were records of these old peoples and what they looked like and, and then how they interacted with the Egyptians. And, you know, like, there's this place in, in Egypt called Amarna, and there was an Assyrian embassy in Amarna. And so they have Egyptian texts written in cuneiform on tablets. And I was like, what?
You know, and that, that. I find that so amazing. And the archaeology of it is, Is really quite phenomenal. So being able to talk about it and say, right, this is, this is our writing history.
[00:34:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:33] Speaker B: You know, and I remember one of the, One of the really important things I would show is I would show, show an ampersand from, from the early Roman period. You would see people look at you and go, what? Like, yeah, this is an ampersand because it's E.T.
it's a conjoined letter, E and T together, and then it changes its shape and it's a ligature that's written in a simple set of strokes.
And I'd go, oh, you thought the ampersand was a modern convention. And, you know, we invite. Vented it in like the 60s. Right, because it appears on the typewriters.
No, it's like 2,000 years old. And people are what?
And little things like when you take the head of an ox. This, this was, was amazing. You know, I was giving a lecture to like 300 people at a craft symposium in Phoenix, and I ran this lecture through and I always do this because it's, this is fascinating.
And I took the head of an oxygen and I showed how it worked in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and then how when you take that head and you rotate it a couple times, so if you have the head, it's like an, an E on the side, and as you rotate it, it becomes the letter A because it's the for alpu, which is a Semitic word for ox.
This woman who must have been like, 65. She was sitting in the front row. She swore so loudly, I. I was like, what. What is wrong with. She went, oh, my God. Did I say that aloud?
Yo, I'm so sorry. She said, wow, is this real? I said, yeah, yeah. And then I ran through a couple letters, like. Like the N is A, is water moving, water flowing. And all of these. These pictographs come from Egyptian hieroglyphs. So when we're writing, we're still writing with pictures that just turned into letters.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:26] Speaker B: And I find that amazing. I love sharing that information because it helps to connect you to scribes from the past in a way that you don't recognize.
[00:36:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:41] Speaker B: And sometimes when you're writing an historical script, if you are calm enough and you are in a peaceful enough place and you are.
You're not using the writing as meditation, because if you're writing and you're meditating, it's hard to concentrate on the spelling.
But there's this happy, happy overlap where you can feel the scribes of the past.
You can feel it through you stretching back into the Egyptian hieroglyphs. You can feel it.
And it. It's so moving.
It's so humbling.
[00:37:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: You sit there and you. You go from this person that you are in this room to this micro dot on this line that you are connected to, because you are. You are on that line as well.
[00:37:37] Speaker A: I actually cannot believe how perfectly you've segued that. But your scriptorium that you. You kind of use on your website, which is where you share all your prerecorded lessons and workshops, and you have just an incredible array of styles and techniques, and from italic and broad edge to Caribbean calligraphy, which I'd love to know more about, to copperplate, English round hat, and on and on. Incredible. And many of them are free. But I also see you include calligraphy and meditation, which is amazing. This idea that can be quite a meditative experience. That. That sense of finding flow when you. You're having to go really slowly, you're having to create and construct leg, you know, letters and strokes in a particular way is. Is something that I find really fascinating. And where did this calligraphy and meditation combination kind of come from for you?
[00:38:33] Speaker B: This has a really great story, and it's a very dear story to me. So every year I used to demonstrate at this thing called Art in Action. And in England, we would have. In Oxfordshire and Water Perry, we'd have thousands of artists in tents, and each tent had its own sort of Subject matter.
So the tent I was in was the calligraphy and illustration tent. And there'd be tons of calligraphers there, like six, six or eight calligraphers. And we all knew each other. And, you know, it was great because I got to see Gaynor again, who taught me for two years and had to put up with my craziness. And one year, I learned something that she had done for me that I didn't know about. You know, I graduated top of my class, but they didn't teach you how to make money.
So that was in June, and then in July, all these letters started arriving from calligraphy guilds around the country. So. Oh, would you. We would love you to come and teach. This is great.
Must have been about five or six years later.
I learned that when I graduated, Gaynor had written to a lot of these guilds to say, this boy is amazing. You need to get him to come and teach. He has a very different perspective on teaching calligraphy. And so I remember walking over to Kena with tears in my eyes, and I said, I just learned that you had done this.
She said, oh, it was nothing. You know, you were so good at school. She said, you really drove me crazy, though. She said, but you were so inquisitive. And I was like, oh, my God, thank you so much.
And so I. I started developing this approach to writing, which was slower and more cadenced.
It had this. You didn't just sort of write a stroke, and you went, 1, 2, 3. You went and 1. And that was part of how I wrote, because I would move the tool and stop and lift, and it was very like a dance on the page.
So I studied ballet in Trinidad as well, and I did acting and singing.
And the singing is a big part of my life because I used to sing competitively in Trinidad. And, of course, the singing tied in to the way I wrote because it somehow affected the way I breathe. And so I would always tell people, remember, inhale on the upstroke and exhale on the downstroke. And then there's a little shift where the lungs have to change over to expiration and that little space. A lot happens in that space. So when. When you're really learning deep meditation techniques, breathing is a really important part. And understanding how the breath works is fascinating, but it's intrinsically linked to the way we write.
And I didn't understand what I was doing. I was allowing the writing to guide me. And I remember I was standing around, I was doing my talk, and I did the talk on the history of the Alphabet. And then I would take a letter and I would run that whole letter through a sort of two and a half thousand year period. So people would see it evolve and it was really great. And there was this little boy, David, who was standing there, and he stood there for three hours as I talked. Because I broke my lecture. I had little 25 minute segments of different things. I did the history of the Alphabet, then I did the letter, and then I did the Roman scripts, and then I did the ancial scripts. And then I did. I talked a little bit about the insular scripts, like the Southumbrian and Northumbrian scripts, which are really particular to England and Wales. England, Scotland and Wales. And then I would talk about Carolingian scripts into the proto Gothic scripts and then the Gothic scripts. And that took a little while because there's so many scripts. So each segment was like 25 minutes.
This little boy, who must have been about 11, he stood there for three hours. And people would come and go and some people would stay.
And this man kept staring at him and sort of tussling his hair, obviously his dad.
But the look on his face, I was like, something's wrong with this guy.
So then the next day, David's back.
I'm like, oh, hello.
He said, oh, hi. I said, what's your name? He said, david. I said, you were here yesterday. He said, yeah, yeah. He said, oh, I really loved it. Thank you so much. I said, what would you like to see? He said, I'd like to see the one letter. I said, okay, we'll do a D and you could take it home, right? So I wrote this thing and his. His father was. Was crying.
This is odd. And I went off for lunch and I saw his dad and I said, oh, you're David's father. And this man grabbed me and started sobbing. Ruined my T shirt.
I said, what's the matter? He said, david has severe attention deficit disorder. I have never seen him still for more than five minutes. And he stood for three hours. He was completely transfixed. He said, I don't know what you are doing, and I don't know what is flowing through what you are doing. He said, but God has really blessed you.
And I was so moved by this. I cried so much.
And I went back to the tent and so I was much calmer, much more peaceful.
And so I started talking about writing and how we should write more patiently and we should be careful with ourselves and just because we make a mistake, we shouldn't sort of go crazy. And I was, you know, I was much slower because I was also internalizing what. What had just happened with David and his father. And as I was writing and talking, this woman in front of me reached across and grabbed the hand of the man next to her, who she didn't know. I could see people holding each other's hands.
And I looked up and people crying.
And I was very emotional. And I said, are you all alright? And they were like, what are you doing?
This is amazing. You've really reached into my heart. What is happening?
And so I started afterwards, after Art in Action, I remember going home and thinking, what just happened?
What was that about?
There's obviously something to do with the way we write that connects to our heart.
And so I started really doing some deep meditations and focusing on the writing and the breath and trying to understand how the breathing affects the writing. And when somebody is truly focused on you writing, how it reaches into them, it creates a feedback loop and it allows them to instigate healing in themselves because they are now so at peace that the universe goes, I see you, yeah. And touches them and their emotions start to unravel. Because peace only starts from dealing with the walls that you built inside yourself.
And so I really started digging into how writing, and this is one of the reasons I don't post sped up videos on my Instagram, because the pace of the writing, that's how you reach people, that's how you help them heal. Yeah, that's why we do calligraphy. You know, you talk to anybody and they'll tell you, I came to calligraphy because I was hurt or because I needed help or somehow. And I always tell people, you know, you didn't choose this calligraphy called you, you had seen something as a child, or, you know, for me, it was my mother's handwriting, you know, my great grandfather's calligraphy, you know, his Chinese work. And for a lot of people, they might have gotten a set as a kid or they might have seen some beautiful writing in a museum and it just grabbed them.
And then life took over. And then later on in life, something happened and they needed. They needed healing.
And the brain goes, do you remember that? That is calling to you now.
And it grabs you because if you choose to do something, you can very easily give it up.
When something chooses you, giving it up is not an option. And when you look at calligraphers, all these crazy people collecting paper under their beds, hiding, you know, I had one moment say, oh, when I picked up calligraphy, my husband was so Happy because I wasn't wasting money on shoes. She said. But what he doesn't know is, you know, nibs are small, and I spent so much money on nibs, and I can hide them.
You cannot be this obsessive about something if you chose it, you only. You are only this obsessive about it if it chose you. Yeah, the meditation, then. Then you have to. You have to realize that how do you get from it choosing you to you connecting with it on such a deep level that it helps you to heal.
And that's where the slowing down really helps. I tell students, you know, the reason why writing slower really works is because you're giving the tool the time to do the work.
[00:47:50] Speaker A: That's beautiful, right? Capture that. We're going to bottle that. That's the strap line.
I mean, honestly, Paul, like you talked about goosebumps. Goosebumps all over the place. I'm feeling incredibly emotional. You've just tapped into something that is. Really does speak to a lot of people. And I think even if you have never dabbled in calligraphy before, people understand the concept of having a tool in your hand and being able to make marks on a paper and connecting to something that is transforming in front of your eyes, bringing those connections through. The whole kind of ancestral side of it, I think is. Just takes it into another dimension, doesn't it? And that sort of spiritual aspect of it, which maybe not everybody has experienced, whether that. Wherever they are on their. Their journey with it, but it's definitely something that people can relate to. That idea of slowing down, that thing calling to you. I think it's absolutely fascinating and great that you've combined the two so that people can explore it, if they haven't yet.
[00:48:57] Speaker B: But it's. It's now more.
More than before because you just mentioned, you know, that people are on different calligraphic journeys. When I started teaching, I knew that there was this very spiritual side to the practice.
This is why, you know, I don't write swear words with beautiful script. I tried that in the past, and it didn't work. There was something wrong.
And what we're writing, what we are using the script for, you know, calligraphy is a sacred thing.
When you think that Bibles were written, not just Bibles, you think of every religion, there is always a formal calligraphic construct used to represent the word of God or spiritual teachings.
They are. Calligraphy is a sacred thing, and we have to treat it as such.
This is about a holistic approach to the craft and how it helps you to Become who you're meant to be.
[00:49:57] Speaker A: And also, as you say, it calls to you. So those people who maybe don't have that connection or can't, aren't ready to receive the connection, that sense of meditative flow, or really believe and trust in that process and open up to it, may not be ready to even learn or practice calligraphy. You know, the idea is they're not.
[00:50:18] Speaker B: They're not ready for their own healing.
[00:50:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:21] Speaker B: And it's only when you get to the point where you're like. When you really settle into it and you're like, wow, this is.
You know how many times I've been writing and I start crying.
[00:50:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:31] Speaker B: I just start crying because I could feel this thing swelling in my chest. And I know that it's some emotion that has been locked away that needs, you know, that needs help.
[00:50:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: And the slower you write, you know, you really sort of take your time with the writing, the tools and materials, get a chance to interact with each other. And then when you're writing.
So I always teach there's. Of the line, there are two parts. You have a trace in the air and a mark on the page. And if you're breathing slowly and rhythmically and you're writing in cadence with the breath, you don't have to space the letters because your breath naturally spaces the letters.
So spacing, which is something a lot of people struggle with and you know, most people fail at spacing because they are trying to do the spacing, but if they allow the breath to do the spacing, the spacing will immediately sort itself out.
[00:51:28] Speaker A: It's incredible, isn't it? It's incredible we can overthink things so much. What I'm impressed is that you have got such academic knowledge and it's so theory based, but practically and kind of emotionally intelligent around all of these, you know, tied in and connected to all of these incredible areas of writing systems and paleography and all. I mean, we could go on for hours, couldn't we? But I wanted to touch because I feel like this is a perfect question to follow up with and bring our conversation to a close. But this series, we're exploring the theme of kind of legacy and innovation.
And I just wondered. I know it's a big question, but what are you sort of hoping to see in the next few years for calligraphy or this sort of world of letters?
[00:52:19] Speaker B: I was very conscious of developing a system which would help people to learn a script faster and have it more ingrained in them.
The idea was more understanding rather than Learning. So this developed out of people messaging me. I had hundreds of thousands of emails over a sort of 20 year period. And some of the questions that had the highest number of emails started with things like, how do you write so lightly? How are your letters so accurate?
How is the spacing so perfect?
So I started to think about how I arrived, and this is how I came up with my fourfold symmetry.
And the fourfold symmetry looks at angular confinement. So we have a geometric construct which houses the letter, so you're not guessing. Then we. I developed elliptical confinement because we have these movements that we make as we breathe, which have to trace through the air to get to where the tool has to go to make the mark.
And so I found connections with the trajectories that we move on in the air.
I found connections with those that look like planets moving around a central sun, because it's really crazy, crazy stuff. And then I look at continuous movement. If you're doing it slowly and rhythmically and you're lifting, and then different parts of the letters have different variable velocities.
So I never use the word speed. I always say the pace at which you're writing. Because when students hear speed, they immediately start to think fast, and you don't want that.
So this fourfold symmetry is something that I've been working on and I keep updating because I think it's a really important way to connect to the letters mechanically and then connect to them emotionally.
And so I want people to recognize that there is a deeper approach to the practice and that comes from breathing.
So that's one part of my legacy.
The other part of my legacy is tools.
So having done calligraphy for lots of the big fashion houses, and I've done tons of weddings and made some really beautiful wedding stationery, I knew that after a certain time I would not be able to keep addressing envelopes because of the damage it did to my hands. And so I started thinking of ways to help people not damage their hands. So I have this entirely new hold that I teach which everybody who's learned it, I had a left hander learn it and he said, oh my gosh, I was going to give up. And this has changed the way I work.
[00:54:58] Speaker A: Is this the holder for the nib?
[00:54:59] Speaker B: No, no. This is the way in which you.
[00:55:01] Speaker A: Hold the pen, stuff the handhold.
[00:55:04] Speaker B: And so I developed that. And then I did these videos on posture, how we sit when we write, placement of the page. Where is the page on the desk when you're writing? Posture and position. The position of the tool in the hand.
Then I did an augmented version of muscular movement and whole arm movement. And then I did my own hold.
And I call these prerequisites. And how do you get people to understand that there are things that you have to do before you pick up the tool? And so from there, and I knew, because I was going to stop envelope addressing, that I would want to make products because as I was addressing envelopes, I would run into problems. You know, this doesn't work. That doesn't work. How do you make something to make it easier?
And so, like, I came up with this, this amazing tool called the pscribe lining template.
[00:55:59] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:56:00] Speaker B: Which.
It's the largest template that's available because it's a full sheet. And it works on both A4 and US letter size. And you just drop it on the sheet and you can rule up a sheet in less than 30 seconds.
[00:56:14] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:56:15] Speaker B: And because of all the angles on the side, you turn it to the correct angle and it gives you the slant lines. And because there are all these holes in it, if you have it on a pad, there are anchoring tram pins that you put and you can slide it up and down the pad. Right. So you're not having to sort of move. And because of all the holes, you can tessellate up the pattern onto larger sheets. And so, you know, I'm a little bit crazy when it comes to stuff like this.
And, you know, I have new inks coming out because I've been really dissatisfied with the inks that exist because they don't do what I want them to do.
So I worked with Hamburg Inc. On this. And. And so I've been just starting to test them. And they're beautiful. I wanted a pointed nib black ink and a broad edge nib black ink, because the same ink doesn't work on those two tools. And I wanted very specific things out of them. So, you know, there are lots of other products that I'm Planning. I have 60 products that I want to make because I know they will make calligraphers lives easier. But between that and doing the classes and, you know, I'm really keen to leave behind a series of. Of workshops that systematically teach you the scripts.
Because I don't want our historical understanding of the scripts to disappear. I want us, I want calligraphers to recognize that the learning of the history of our craft, the paleographical side of it, is a big part of our profession. And it's your responsibility to carry that tradition on.
And, you know, I remember when modern calligraphy came out, all the traditional calligraphers were up in arms about it. And I said to a lot of people, listen, you should be happy that this thing has happened because it is encouraging people to write.
So what we need to do is how do we encourage people practicing modern calligraphy to fall in love with the historical calligraphy? Because it will only help their modern calligraphy get better.
[00:58:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:12] Speaker B: And that's been a tricky situation for the last sort of 15 years.
I had so many modern calligraphers message me early on, say I can't improve. How, how is your work so sharp?
Because I understand how to, how to improve.
You need to study some historical scripts and watching people go back to them and then come back to modern calligraphy. Oh, my work so much better because I went and I actually studied copper plate. I really studied how to use the tool.
So, you know, I think, I think for a lot of us, our legacy for what's going on should be to find a way to connect to the craft historically and not lose that, because it's very easy for us to write scripts that are less demanding and not write historical scripts.
And then what's going to happen to the historical scripts when those of us who know how to write them when we die off?
Where is that information going to come from? How are, how is the younger generation going to be able to connect to that? So that's, that's, that's my, that's my sort of goal.
[00:59:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:29] Speaker B: Sharing that.
[00:59:30] Speaker A: That's the work for the next, however long, next 108 years of your life, because you've already.
Oh, my goodness, Paul, what a fascinating, fascinating conversation. And, you know, I wanna, I want to get into all those extra rabbit holes that we haven't covered, but I want to make sure people know how to find out more about you. So it's pascribe.com yeah. But also they can follow and connect with you on Instagram at Pascribe and LinkedIn. And as always, we'll put all the links in today's show notes, but the community as well. And the community, yeah.
[01:00:07] Speaker B: So when you, when you buy a full time, a full course at the Scriptorium, you get access to the subscription tier. And every Wednesday from 6 to 8 GMT, we have office hours where I actually go through the homework that people post. And that's a big part of my commitment to my students. Because, you know, you can't do a course and then just abandon people.
[01:00:30] Speaker A: Yeah. There's so much more to do and to learn and to stay connected is. Is incredibly important and to inspire all these people. But could you ever have a holiday?
[01:00:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I have holidays. It's just when I have a holiday, I have to plan because we went to Mexico two years ago. All these messages from Mexico and colleagues. Oh, would you give us a talk? Tim was like, you are only allowed one day out of our holiday.
They talk.
And I went and I gave a talk to about 100 calligraphers.
[01:01:01] Speaker A: So actually, you're still working wherever you go?
[01:01:04] Speaker B: You know, it's not really work, is it?
[01:01:06] Speaker A: It's not work when you love it like you do. No. Oh, Paul, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure.
[01:01:12] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Laura, thank you very, very much.
[01:01:16] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the Life of Letters. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcast so you don't miss the rest of the series.
If you can, leave a quick review that really helps the podcast reach more ears. And if you're enjoying these conversations, please consider buying us a coffee to help keep the episodes coming. All the details are in the show notes.
Finally, once again, a big thank you to Speedball Arts for supporting this season and for being part of my calligraphy journey from the very start. Until next time, keep writing, keep creating, and keep celebrating the life of Letters.
