Penwork Where You Find It

"Elephant with Banner", Anonymous Colby College Museum of Art

The first time I attended Parents' Weekend at Colby College in Maine, I made sure to visit their impressive art museum, one of the finest on any campus anywhere.  I was amazed and delighted to find several examples of penwork hanging proudly in their American Folk Art exhibit.

They even mentioned old Platt Rogers Spencer!  Pretty cool, I thought, since I had just come from the Spencerian Saga...

Some detail on that elephant:

Then there's the King of the Jungle:

"Lion", C.L. Horton Colby College Museum of Art

And finally, a memorial piece by James Macomber.  Apologies for the blurry photos....

"Mourning Picture of  N.L. Willis", James H. Macomber Colby College Museum of Art

 The artist rendered his own name in Masterpiece Flourishing!

"Done with a steel pen"

A lovely visit all around!

West Coast Saga

The first-ever West Coast Spencerian Saga with master penmen Michael Sull and Bill Kemp concluded over two weeks ago, and I'm still digesting it all.

It was a completely different experience from the longstanding Geneva-on-the-Lake Sagas, which are retreat-like in nature, held at the beautiful Lakehouse Inn on the south shore of Lake Erie in October when the air is crisp and the leaves are turning. Platt Rogers Spencer himself lived, taught, and is buried in Geneva.

In April the Berkeley venue, Castle in the Air, is busy, lively, and very connected to the Fourth Street goings-on, with lots of great places to eat and shop during breaks from the pen and ink. Art seems to be in the very air there. And... just a twenty-minute drive across the Richmond bridge from my house!

Both experiences are awesome: the former rich with penmanship history and the latter showing Spencerian's relevance in a contemporary setting.

Bill's digital overhead projector enabled this kind of detail! Sure beat struggling to watch over someone's shoulder. This is a comparison of the Nikko G and EF Principal nibs...

At the top is my final project: My life has a superb cast, but I can't figure out the plot, a quote I love and neglected to attribute to Ashleigh Brilliant. The script is Spencerian, of course, in Dr. Ph. Martin's Bleedproof White with embellishments in Spectralite gold. I used an EF Principal for the text and a Nikko G for the offhand flourishing.

Castle in the Air has published all of our final projects on its blog. I was amazed at the variety and ingenuity as the participants--who ranged from first-timers to twenty-year veterans, hobbyists to seasoned professionals--showcased the variety of techniques we had learned during the week from . It was a fun and lively group!

And the entire week we had the strangest feeling someone was watching us...

The Magnolian Hand

I've never looked at nature quite the same since attending the Spencerian Saga in Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio. It was there I learned that Platt Rogers Spencer himself took his cue from the oval shapes of the stones he found on the shores of Lake Erie to create the lovely and lively ornamentation of his Spencerian hand. According to Wikipedia, "...because paper was difficult to obtain at the time, Spencer wrote on birch tree bark, sand, ice, snow, the fly-leaves of his mother's Bible and, by permission of a cobbler, the leather in his shop."

Surely these about-to-burst magnolia blossoms in my front yard this morning could inspire some lovely letterforms! If nothing else, they say that Spring is surely on its way.