「Take Your Pleasure Seriously」The way of handwriting

letters
from the past
—
I can’t recall the exact moment in which writing went from being a passion to my line of work, but I do know that it wasn’t premeditated. I began working when I was seventeen, and still a student. I’ve had a lot of different jobs in the past, including some very humble ones. My main interest at the time was graffiti, drawing letters all day just like now, even if I did it in a completely instinctive manner. Like many of my peers, I spent hours sketching out what would later see the light—paradoxically, at night—on subway and train cars or in some other corner of the city.

I got by in school, but my strongest memory is of pen and paper, and how intent I was on improving my tag so I could show it to other graffiti writers. I recall choosing my first tag in 1994, based on the letters I liked, without knowing what it meant; first it was “Been,” which later became “Bean” to avoid dealing with the double “e.” There were often no books in my backpack, which I filled instead with cans of spray paint cracked open as soon as school was out, coating diesel trains parked near the station in my hometown on the outskirts of Milan: during class I would prepare the outline, and by 2:30 that afternoon I was out there painting it on the train cars.

Ditto each evening: I always had a marker in my pocket and left marks that to most people looked like little more than small scrawls, while for us writers they grew increasingly complex, and increasingly important, because that was our ID in the subculture we ourselves had created, a micro-society most people ignored. If I were asked to define it now, I could only awkwardly say that we were a bunch of amicable, maladjusted kids who were trying to escape mediocrity by pursuing a somewhat risky pastime. I think this “parallel education” left such a deep mark on me that I decided not to shed it as I grew—it was my real schooling, and I knew I should make something of it.

I found the graphic design that teachers talked about relatively interesting. I remember the transition from analog to digital being a bit traumatic: when I began design school I was fascinated by Pantone, transfer sheets, Rapidographs, and works drawn on Schoeller paper; when I finished, in 1997, all that had been replaced by computers. Had I told anyone I wanted to be a calligrapher, they would certainly have thought I was mad. “There’s no market for that,” they’d have said. All anyone talked about was websites, servers, and Flash, while I was running around with a large black leather-bound sketchbook full of drawings, photos, and sketches of graffiti and a few works of primordial calligraphy. My experiences as a graphic designer came later, and they weren’t very creative. For the most part I did page layouts for design and architecture magazines. A few ad agencies gave me job interviews. I remember an art director who, looking at some of my images, said, “It looks tough. Interesting…” He made a few color photocopies and never called me back.

My job search grew more discouraging by the day: I had learned some graphic design software, but I didn’t want using it to become my full-time job. I decided to give it up, because the repulsion I felt toward the gadgets that had completely wiped out all manual work in the field was too strong for me to pretend nothing was wrong and to try adapting to the change. In 2003 I found work at a music store that was part of a large chain. I stayed there for four years, and after work I began to draw and practice with a nib pen, making works on canvas and experimenting with lettering, mostly in a self-taught way. Then I began receiving strange work requests, everything from commissions spray painting stores to customizing booths, products, and model cars for specialized trade fairs. I also began lettering invitations for some stylists with whom a few of my other calligrapher friends had been working for years; it was a real privilege, they paid me to just write all day, and three or four days’ work paid more than what I earned in a month at the store. It was also an exercise that improved my writing, something I probably wouldn’t have done otherwise. Writing names and addresses for eight hours straight can be a kind of “slavery,” as James Clough calls it, but it can be quite useful. I often gave up my vacation days to do that work and other jobs, and when I had no days left I made up absurd excuses to get time off. For a while, some of my close relatives were on the brink of death about once a month (my apologies, everyone!).

I hadn’t yet begun posting works on the web, but a few photos ran in some magazines and I was busy with performances by Rebel Ink, a collective I was part of alongside Rae Martini, Marco Klefisch, and Francesca Gandolfi. We’d begun touring many Italian cities, and later toured abroad as well; the Rebel Ink site was our long-term homepage, but a lot of people also came out to see us in person, and word began to spread. We began performing in 2003 and our last events took place in Prague in 2009, after which we all took different paths. We were well aware of the fact that it wasn’t just some random experience; it had given us real meaning without tying us down to the world of street art, a niche we had never really identified with, and had distanced ourselves from at the very outset. We knew our work with graffiti would come to a turning point, and we were determined to decide where it would go from there.

The idea that someone I didn’t even know might wear something I’d drawn piqued my curiosity. I designed my first “official” T-shirt in 2006 for Gold, a company I still work with, and with whom in 2010 I co-produced an entire line. Then came the graphics for Iuter, a streetwear brand founded by friends that was starting to take off. A lot of the connections that brought these commissions came from people I’d met through hip-hop, a scene I had been part of for several years, and which remains a integral part of my roots.

Meanwhile, the demand for my work kept growing, to the point where I transitioned to working half days in the store, and then one day I up and quit, just like that. I left my safety net so I could continue drawing letters, without knowing exactly what kind of work I’d chosen to do. About a month later I designed my first headline for an advertising campaign. I couldn’t believe it, and I strolled out of the agency light on my feet, singing to myself, almost leaping for joy like a scene in a film. I was definitely afraid of not making it, but then I understood that, even if it went badly, I could always go back and find work somewhere else. In the meantime I intensified my calligraphy studies and began taking evening courses in computer graphics, type design, and printmaking, so that I’d have as many visual languages as possible to apply to my work. I knew I had to do that in order to gain a deeper understanding of the subject, although I also have to admit that it wasn’t easy to continue drawing letters all evening after spending the entire day doing it. I bought and read books on typography with an almost maniacal diligence. Actually, it was outright maniacal. But that was a bit of a passing phase, too…

the calligrapher’s
profession today
—

Up until about some years ago I couldn’t have imagined refusing certain gigs and devoting my time only to the ones that interested me—I considered that a luxury. But soon thereafter I found myself in that very position, having to make hard choices.
First of all, I had to deal with the ethical issues: when your passion becomes your profession, you’re faced with the choice of either working or not working with clients that might not share your same values. Soon, however, you realize that in such cases ethics are really just a matter of personal preference, something you have to sort out for yourself. “Purity” and the need for others’ approval are probably relics of graffiti writing.

I chose to try my hand at commercial work very early on. I thought I’d be able to do it just like so many of my idols had done—Herb Lubalin, Saul Bass, and Milton Glaser—without it detracting at all from the splendor of the final creations. The thing that fascinates me about those designers and many other letterers is the way their logos and brands have become part of popular culture—the well-designed lettering found on everyday products, on supermarket shelves and everywhere else. I walk through stores and I encounter Massimo Vignelli on the bottles of Feudi di San Gregorio wine, Saul Bass on boxes of Kleenex, and even Salvador Dalí in the Chupa Chups lollipop logo.

Up to now I’ve found a happy medium, alternating purely commercial jobs with more personal ones, or ones for causes I openly support. Such manual work definitely takes time, especially since I’ve decided to do it all myself and in keeping with traditional methods. If I’m asked to work on something, I absolutely cannot delegate it to anyone else, so I always try to do everything from the first pencil sketches to the scans and digitization. Each step left to others means giving up a bit of control, and in my case, unfortunately, that also means compromising on quality. I’m fairly resigned to dividing my time between drafting table and computer, trying to answer e-mails on one without letting the ink dry on the other. It should also be said that not every time of day is well-suited to doing calligraphy: your mood, or even just a bit too much espresso, can compromise the quality of your writing, and I’ve found it’s almost always best to leave pen work to the evening, after the phone has stopped ringing.

　
The starting point of a work is fundamental; a good brief can make all the difference. If they tell you “go ahead, we trust your judgment, do something with your own style,” or if their references are confused or conflicting, it means the client doesn’t have clear thoughts and it will be more work than expected. It’s almost always better to deal with small- to medium-sized clients. The bigger the commission, the more people get involved, and then things can get a bit schizophrenic: you might have worked several days on a project that suddenly gets shelved for no apparent reason; you might be asked to make changes or meet insane deadlines that don’t even give you time to see whether your design might be improved upon—either way, you have to pull it off. Clients rarely realize how much time it really takes to work by hand, so you have to be pretty fast in order to meet their deadlines, which are often insane.

I addressed the absurdity of some bad habits that usually increase the demand for designer’s work (and not only the work) in a series of embittered, ironic t-shirts produced by Gold called the Designer Series. I featured phrases like: “Unfortunately, we don’t have a budget for this project,” “Unfortunately, our timeline is really tight,” and “This is a non-profit project, but we guarantee maximum visibility,” accompanied by annoying insects, a mosquito, a fly, a maggot—all phrases we regrettably hear a lot when being asked to work. The shirts were super popular and, paradoxically, one ad agency even asked me if they could print some with their logos as Christmas gifts for their employees. Apparently they were amused by the very phrases they themselves often uttered. But I don’t find it amusing in the least that it’s considered normal for the hard work of graphic designers and photographers to go unpaid, or that they’re constantly bid down and expected to give outrageous discounts, relegating quality to second place. I think the worst kind of commission is when you’re dealing with accounts that reason solely according to market logic.

In certain cases talking about formal qualities and color tones becomes pointless. Especially in advertising, you get the feeling you’re being “bought,” like you’re the mere executor of questionable ideas that you cannot call into question; it can be very frustrating and sometimes alienating, as if you’re just a cog in the machine, tightening the same screw all day on the assembly line. You can design a logotype or a headline for an ad campaign that then becomes the company’s property: you might see it distorted or modified, its letters cut out to assemble other words, and never once are you asked about any of it; naturally, those who see the ad plastered up all around town or in the newspapers have no idea of the back story, they just think you did a mediocre, sub-standard job.

Fortunately, I’ve also met some great art directors, ones with a real eye, culture, and sensibility. Some film directors have asked me to do the titles and credits for their movies, spending hours explaining to me their vision and exactly what they had in mind; that proved their total passion for the project, and when that happens and you reflect on the outcome, you can feel satisfied and even a bit amazed. I really believe in the concept of gratification: using your own capabilities to complete something that makes you feel useful, alive, active, and fully realized. That feeling is amplified through collaborative teamwork, those rare instances when a group works together, each with his/her own role, casting aside ego and vanity in favor of doing the best work possible. Such occasions include: witnessing the premiere of shows like “C’era una volta a Roma” (Once Upon A Time in Rome), after months of work that culminated in a couple hours of music and high suspense, remembering—as the images cross the enormous screen before a vast audience—every single letter drawn by brush at the drafting table on boiling July afternoons; seeing the reproduction of the Saint Gallen Globe finished after years of work in many craftspeople’s hands, each bringing their own experience to the object; the titles projected behind the orchestra at the premiere of Cesare Picco’s concert “La storia di Genji,” (The Tale of Genji) at the Teatro Nuovo in Verona; the opening titles of “Io sono l’amore” (I Am Love) at the cinema. These projects and a few others gave me that indescribable sensation I continually seek, the feeling that pushes me forward on my quest through the fascinating world of letterforms.

In addition to the work, memories of the voyage—the people and places you’ve encountered—stay with you. I don’t, therefore, view of all these things as mere aspects of making a living; rather, they are a fundamental part of life itself.

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This article was originally published in Take Your Pleasure Seriously (2012) by Luca Barcellona.

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Luca Barcellona is born in 1978. He has his own studio in Milan, where he works as a freelance graphic designer and calligrapher. Letters are the main ingredient of his creations. He teaches calligraphy with the Associazione Calligrafica Italiana and holds workshops and lectures in several cities, as the last one in California and Australia. The means of his work is to make the manual skill of an ancient art as writing and the languages and instruments of the digital era coexist. In 2003 he founded with Rae Martini and Marco Klefisch the collective Rebel Ink, with which he gives life to a live exhibition of calligraphy, writing and illustration. In 2009 he has worked for the National Museum of Zurich, with calligraphist Klaus-Peter Schäffel, to realize the faithful reproduction of a big globe dated back to the 1569, using calligraphy with original materials (quill and natural inks). Among the brands that requested his lettering we can number Carhartt, Nike, Mondadori, Zoo York, Dolce & Gabbana, Sony BMG, Seat, Volvo, Universal, Eni, Mont Blanc, Wall Street Institute. Among his latest collective exhibitions: "Stuck on the City" in Prague, "Don't Forget To Write" at Carhartt Gallery (Germany). As well as taking part to several independent projects his works appeared in many publications. In 2010 he produced his own personal clothing brand "Luca Barcellona Gold Series". He recently published his first monographic book Take Your Pleasure Seriously by Lazy Dog Press, the publishing house which is a member himself. His study into lettering led him to experience from graffiti to classic calligraphy, up to big wallpainting, typography and letterpress printing.
http://www.lucabarcellona.com/

The Malleable Letter Shape
Thoughts From the Practice of a Text Designer for Stone

Bad typography is older than typography
In which I explain that good letters are better off with good spacing.

As we compare inscriptions across all ages we see differences in quality. Most obvious is the quality of letter shapes, but ‘good’ letterforms don’t always make satisfying inscriptions. A magnificent letter like the Imperial Roman capital is not foolproof. One can find inscriptions where the letterforms in themselves have a most beautiful, rational and sensitive balance, but where letter- and word-spacing are badly conceived, and/or where the placing of the text block (Fig. 1) doesn't show the sense of balance we find in their architecture and their letter shapes. Good letterforms badly spaced! Isn’t that a waste?

 
1: Roman-Germanic Museum, Köln, Germany.
2 and 3: Two pictures along the Via Appia in Rome.
Poor letterspacing in DATVS and IRENE, comparable to spacing with inflexible metal type.

Everyone who designs letters by hand gives special attention to the shapes of the counters. In many Roman inscriptions the inter-letter spaces and the room around the text look accidental, haphazard; not ‘designed’ (see also Fig. 1). It is as if the makers were not conscious of them in the same way as they were when conceiving the counter shapes. Less successful inscriptions, even those made long before the invention of movable type, look like poorly laid out printing: they consist of beautiful but inflexible letter shapes, badly placed in relation to one another and thus create a poor rhythm (Fig. 2 and 3). Throughout the ages it seems to have been common for many inscription makers to regard text design as merely linking letters to make words and then lines, and to put these lines one under the other. This way of working suggests that model alphabets (e.g. by Felice Feliciano, Luca de Pacioli, Albrecht Dürer, etc.) must have been around much earlier than the Renaissance. As we have seen, the existence of ‘untouchable’ model letters promotes lack of thought in layout. To start from a set of ‘ideal’ and thus inflexible letter shapes belongs to typography and seems out of place where it comes to handmade lettering. Typography is mainly about fixed letterforms in pre-determined spaces, but everyone who composes text with personally designed letters, has the opportunity of doing better than merely line up the letters of his or her chosen ‘ideal’ alphabet.

The malleable letter shape
In which the uselessness of inflexible letter shapes for certain purposes is explained.

Many formal inscriptions have been made in which the craftsman didn’t have the idea of ‘malleable lettershapes’ in mind. For me, designing text is about weighing the spaces within the letters against the spaces between them. I try to create rhythm by tuning these different kinds of negative shapes to one another. I regard letter proportions at the same time as a result and as a starting point. Letters are malleable units that have the potential to improve rhythm and the composition.

4: CORNEEL   5: ROEL   6: SANNE, ELMO (4, 5 and 6 are presents for births)  
7: QUINTEN (letter Q resembles a 2 as this is a remembrance for one child of twins)  
8: EM (initials for a couple married for 25years)  
9: TWEEN (twone or two/one) necklace ca 2.5cm wide   10: ROEL (another present for a birth)    
11: Initials H, J & L; and 7 times 7 (for a 49th birthday)

All examples by the author

Designing names on naturally shaped stones (Figs. 4 to 11) has played an important role in my breaking free of thinking in terms of typographic letterforms (though I feel closer to typography than to calligraphy because I draw rather than write). When you would put a typeset word within the irregular contour of a pebble, you would end up with letters that are too small, and the space around the word would be excessive and appear un-designed. That space would feel wasted and the lettering would be unable to compete with the explicitly physical presence of the stone. So in most cases it is advisable to use a combination of letters of different sizes, ligatures and, occasionally, letters enclosed within other letters, also called ‘nesting’ (Fig. 12). This way we can make the irregular contours of word and pebble reinforce one another and the un-designed space around the lettering can be turned from waste to full-value negative space. Readability may decrease, but a name-pebble is not in the first place meant as a ‘legible to the last degree’-inscription. It is an aesthetic and emotionally charged object.

12:  UXORIS (wife of). Example of nesting. Pisa, Italy.

Types of stone letters
In which I recognize: GRAPHIC skeleton letters, an IN-BETWEEN form and THREE-DIMENSIONAL letters.

The scratched graffiti (Figs. 13 and 14) as sometimes found on old church walls is a good example of ‘graphic’ skeleton letterforms. They were made with a pointed object in a homecoming movement (drawn toward the writer) and without preliminary drawing. The making is close to the act of writing.

13 and 14: Etruscan inscriptions (between 7th and 1st century BC). Chiusi, Italy.

15 and 16:  Early Christian inscriptions. Rome.

17: Republican style. National Roman Museum.

Early Christian (Fig. 15 and 16) and Republican Roman (Fig. 17) inscriptions fall between ‘skeleton’ and ‘three-dimensional’ lettering. The lines are slightly wider, they have a cleaner V-cut with more finished sides but the attention is not explicitly drawn towards the three-dimensionality of the lettering. I gather that early Christian inscriptions were also made without preliminary drawing but chased [1] with dummy and chisel, and are thus closer to the act of writing (just like the scratched graffiti I described above). Republican Roman inscriptions on the other hand, are more formal. They were probably written on the stone with a piece of charcoal or chalk, and then carved in a narrow V-section with a flat chisel. Through the way they were executed we can relate them more to drawing than writing (we’ll come back to this under ‘A missed chance’). Sometimes the three-dimensionality becomes/became so explicit that we can clearly perceive the play of light and shadow (Figs. 18, 30, 31 and 33).

18: Detail of an inscription by the author
(‘HIC HORA SEMPER AMICIS EST’  Friends are welcome at any hour)

If there is no play of light and shadow because the letters are painted black (Figs. 19 and 20)  (even when quite bold (Fig. 21)), the carving is again ‘graphic’ but in a different way as when scratched.)

19 and 20: Northern Italy (exact whereabouts unknown)

21: Engraved and painted black (The letters lose their sculptural character and become graphic, as if printed)

Properties of typical stone letters:
-Not too thin
-Little thick/thin-contrast
-No long fine serifs

Unless we wish to work in the early Christian, rather graphic (by which I mean not  clearly being three-dimensional) skeleton style, we mustn't design stone letters too thin. Carving a long, clean, narrow V-cut line is not so easy, it demands extra concentration. With a wider line, the incision is deeper and the sides of it are broader. This gives more support to the chisel and makes it easier to make the side-surfaces of the V-cut clean and crisp (if desired).
But there are visual reasons as well. The incision divides the stroke into a dark and a light side so optical illusion makes the carved letter look slightly thinner than it was in its designed stage and will thus easily look too light. Also we read stone inscriptions from a certain distance (further away than when we draw the letter-shapes). And sometimes the stone background can have an explicit surface texture or the architecture on which the text must function can sometimes be quite robust. In all these cases, the lettering will be better made bolder. Of course, harder types of stone make this less obvious. As it takes (a lot) more blows of the chisel to carve in hard stone, a designer/carver will probably tend to take this into account and design slightly lighter letters. Also, in a tough piece of stone, letters will naturally be carved more shallow.

There is an interesting side issue in working on a rough surface. The well-defined contour the designer had in mind changes into a wobbly thing. In the act of executing he must let go of his mental image of the letter outline. Only the center-line and side-surfaces of the v-cut can remain intact so only they can give the letter its visual strength and character.

If we are dealing with an average size of about two inches (5 cm), I wouldn't give stone-cut letters a strong thick/thin contrast. Only with bigger letters, this strong contrast can be achieved without losing the minimum weight that is technically necessary to execute the thin parts. In the Trajan inscription, for example, the smallest letters are about four inches (9.5 cm) high. Their thin parts are, after some 2000 years of weathering, about 0.5 cm thick and the serifs about 1 mm at their thinnest. This ‘Trajan’ contrast is technically less advisable for smaller letters. When we considerably reduce lettering with a Trajan contrast by photocopy, the letters become too light in the horizontals and the serifs and the lettering looses its character. On the other hand, when we look at type and enlarge an example from very small printing, we see less thick/thin contrast than in the larger sizes of the same type. The letters are designed wider, to make up for the inner space taken away by beefing up the thin horizontals.

A third characteristic feature we see in letters with a stone-like character: no long, fine serifs. On many kinds of stone we have to fiddle to carve long and fine serifs. In my opinion that gives the lettering a mannered look, unlike in calligraphy where a hairline can emerge naturally from the pen or the brush. We could state that very fine-grained types of stone like slate may be an exception and that serifs come most naturally on big lettering where they are heavy enough to be carved straightforwardly.

Calligraphic mannerism
What else makes a letter on stone a real stone letter?

When I read Catich’s The Origin of the Serif [2] I felt a profound sympathy for it. He questioned apparently unassailable scientific predecessors and tripped up their established theories through his practical knowledge as a brush-letterer. I saw him as a kind of Robin Hood. He rightly assessed that the lettering on numerous Roman inscriptions was written with the flat brush before being carved. But, being through and through a brush-letterer, his stone　lettering was a pure emulation of his brush designs, a calligraphic mannerism.

A typical calligraphic morphology emerges from the interaction between pen, paper, and ink (in Catich’s case from the interaction between brush, ink and stone). Real stone letters should be (re)considered through their specific material. They should be developed through the act of carving, taking into account the specificity of the stone, the carving implement, the size of the letters and the function of the text. Aspiring lettercarvers should, as it were, learn to design not on paper or screen but with the chisel straight onto the stone.

A fine-grained stone which has a mild and even hardness and texture may persuade the lettercarver to imitate beauty he or she has seen in calligraphy or typography. Calligraphically schooled carvers find it difficult to set aside their pen/brush skills (they often end up with what feels for me as paperwork transposed on a piece of stone), while typographically schooled carvers tend to produce typography on stone (Figs. 19, 20, 22, 23). For those reasons, lettering on stone is sometimes not stone lettering but a mere transposition of shapes developed in another medium.

22: Rome                               

23: Whereabouts unknown

I suddenly realized this when I first saw Republican inscriptions at the National Roman Museum (Fig. 17). They were, in contrast to the smooth white marble used for the Trajan inscription, carved in rougher – presumably local – kinds of stone such as Travertine marble (Fig. 24). It is not possible to carve fine strokes or serifs in this kind of stone, so an obvious thick/thin-contrast and elegant serifs were out of the question. The carving in stone of thick/thin-weighted lettering (as evolved from the flat brush) suddenly showed itself to me as very material specific for the fine-grained stone only the emperor and the very rich could afford. There was more lettering around than only theirs. My love for the Trajan letter suffered from a second blow because until then I had wrongly believed it was ‘The’ Roman lettering. My love for Trajan had already endured the emergence of the typeface with the same name that, compared to its handwritten/carved original, feels lifeless as a stuffed animal. The crude Republican Roman letter suddenly seemed somehow livelier and somehow more real as a stone letter than the highly estimated Trajan (Fig. 25).

24: Example of Travertine marble (not with Republican lettering though)

25: Republican letter style. Via Appia, Rome.

A missed chance

Outline-drawn stone lettering did already exist during the Imperial era. The letter shapes carved to take bronze infilling were designed that way (Figs. 26, 27 and 28) and their weight was very well suited to the imposing architecture they were combined with.
Since Trajan, the change for stone lettering has been from brushwork carved out in stone to outline drawing of a different kind as described above. In 15th-century Italy we see not only the example alphabets of Luca de Pacioli and others with their constructed letters; there is also the emergence of freehand outline-drawn stone letters (Figs. 24 and from 29 to 33). This is, amongst other things, exemplified by the kind of N with a narrow diagonal (Fig. 32), a typical drawn shape that can’t be written straightforwardly with a flat nib or brush. Lettercarvers apparently didn’t anymore take the imperial brush-lettering as their example but deliberately opted for outline drawing. This was a potentially beneficial change for real stone lettering because, as said above, carving is much closer to the act of drawing letters than it is to the act of writing them.

26, 27 and 28: Sockets for bronze lettering. Sienna (26) and Rome (27 and 28).

29: St John Before the Latin Gate, Rome

30 and 31: Pisa

32: In the Camposanto in Pisa  
33: Assisi

With the advent of movable type, though, this retreat from calligraphy led to lettercarvers’ imitating type or calligraphy. Stone lettering unfortunately changed from being the little brother of calligraphy into being the little brother of typography (Figs. 19 to 23) and calligraphy! This has lasted until our day, but there are hopeful signs that lettercarvers are once again ‘thinking stone’.

Author’s note: These thoughts were first presented as lecture in London in 2003.
In 2004, I published the article in issue 8 of Forum (UK), then with more illustrations in Letter Arts Review (US) in 2006, and later in an Australian lettering periodical. Here I present a reworked version for J-LAF, with more pictures.

After my lecture in London, I read Nicolete Gray’s Lettering on Buildings (1960) and found that several of my conclusions, though arrived at by a different route, were quite like hers.

[1]  To chase is to cut with the chisel quite flat against the stone, as opposed to ‘chopping’ where the carver cuts with the chisel more perpendicular to the stone (approximately 60° between the shank of the chisel and the surface of the stone and where - as in the act of chasing - the one corner of the cutting edge remains above the surface. The exact angle of shank to surface depends on the hardness of the piece of stone at hand). The chopping technique is useful when the stone is less solid and when small particles of stone tend to break off in the act of chasing.

[2] Edward M. Catich, The Origin of the Serif (2nd edn., Davenport: Catich Gallery, St. Ambrose University, 1991)

KRISTOFFEL BOUDENS

Born in 1958 in Bruges, Belgium.

Studied art for six years (painting) and trained in lettering under Tom Perkins, Gaynor Goffe and Pieter Boudens.  Informally, Jean-Claude Lamborot and John Nash were important.

Works as an independent textdesigner/lettercarver since 1989.
Has in the meanwhile always been teaching, sometimes lettering for stone, sometimes fine art.

Has lectured in San Francisco, Melbourne, Rome, Vatican City, London, and Cambridge.

Has two sisters and two brothers who are letterers.  His father was the founder of 20th century calligraphy in Belgium.

Lives with his wife and three children in a medieval village near Bruges.