CURATATED OFFERINGS/

AN INTRODUCTION TO CALLIGRAPHIC SENSIBILITIES & CULTURES

Past clients include Columbia Green Community College & Kingston D.R.A.W. Perfect for:

  • Cultural Enrichment/ Student Activities—Events, talks, one-day exploratory workshops, & semester packages exploring hybridity, appropriation, & cultural vulnerability are available.

  • Arts & culture workshops with a focus on international & cross-cultural aesthetics/histories. Particular attention to how global calligraphic arts continue to effect contemporary abstract trends.

Calligraphy is often defined as beautiful writing. In practice, it’s anything but. Ink reveals every hesitation, arrogance, hiding or turning away. Calligraphy, while beautiful, is also trembling & showing up for one’s shortcomings; is incremental shifts in habits in hand & in life; is a visual/historical map of intersecting languages, sacred traditions, & cultural legacies. Oppression, beauty, resistance, prayer.

Situated between discipline & flow, mastery isn’t the goal here. What emerges instead is the cultivation of sustained receptivity & subtle responsiveness. We’ll begin by “savoring” the history & cultural diversity of this art by exploring images of traditional & contemporary calligraphies from around the world. We’ll try our hand in a number of scripts & practice being vulnerable & open as well as focused & bold. Along the way, we’ll pay attention to the role of material culture in social, historical & artistic legacies & to the physical qualities of artistic practice itself— different papers, different tools, posture, breath, companionship & subtle states of being. Working small, working big, we’ll aim for the sweet spot between discipline & play.

**For those seeking traditional workshops in Arabic & Latin Scripts—you’ll find upcoming workshops with Elinor Aishah Holland here.

How I love your handwriting, that beautiful shadow of your voice—Nabokov in a letter to his wife

THE ART OF THE LOVE LETTER: EXPLORATIONS IN WRITING & CALLIGRAPHY

Versions offered at O+ Festival, Kingston & through Brush & Reed:

  • One & two-day intensives. Can include lunch, tapas, & final celebration/participant show.

  • Ignites creativity & wellness through interdisciplinary practices— beginning & practiced writers & artists all walk away with new tools.

  • Generative, associative activities situated between discipline & play offer unique access to self-reflection, embodied courage & self-development.

  • Curated & informal conversations, food, drink, vulnerability, listening, & subtle responsiveness are key ingredients to innovation. Intimate connections are created through elegant, unique approaches to team/community building.

Calligraphy is the providence of love letters. Letterforms, ideograms, & contemporary abstractions have inside of them invisible years of devotion & refinement. So too, with some of the most beautiful people we know. Subtle refinements pass from hand to hand, quietly, for generations & often across cultures. Calligraphy is an embodied practice, elevating language to a place of visual poetry & praise. It’s also earthbound, tied to a body’s pace in the presence of other bodies— requiring an attitude which transcends any hope of mastery (of dominance, control). One that doesn’t ignore the work of generations, in each body:

There are no finish lines in love.

Rather than begin with the repetition of forms, we begin with the one we’re in: Life in a body. Crystal sound-healing bowls, embodied practice, free-write, & food ground us in a place from which to proceed. This savoring is a just a concrete form of praise, offered without intermediary, & from the fullness of one’s faculties—of life, as it’s lived.

Love letters can be a momentary practice, or a way of life.

Elements of calligraphic study are then used to explore ink work as a tool of listening & self-awareness. In ink, as in writing, as in life: Each hesitation, impatience, trembling, each flight from love & toward her— each subtle arrogance—- shows. However, some of the most beautiful letters deviate & shake—revealing that tender capacity to reach & fail & reach anyway. Because missing the mark, but carrying on in good company, is sometimes the most beautiful thing. The aesthetic here is not first of shape or form, but of showing up.

The first love letter you write will be to yourself.

INTERFAITH STUDY GROUPS & PRESENTATIONS

Cross-cultural, interfaith understandings take on a new level through the study of calligraphic traditions, histories, & cultures from around the world. Study is informal—integrating discussions on various sacred traditions, texts, & the nature of revelation with hands-on practice. No experience or specific religious background required. Talks on adab or

Past clients include Central Valley United Methodist Church, Dergah al Farah & Unitarian Universalist Church in NYC.

Your writing is all around me/ it doesn’t leave my bed. There is healing in it for what I’ve been concealing— Al Qushayrī, trans. Kristin Zahra Sands