DRURY BRENNAN

 

When did you first become interested in calligraphy?
My first exposure to calligraphy was off and on. I was always peripherally aware of it as a discipline / art interest that people cultivated, but if I can stretch the definition of “calligraphy” a bit (Greek for “beautiful writing”), my childhood in Los Angeles spent driving around, looking at graffiti on the endless urban landscape with my parents was really the start of my love affair with letters. Back then in the late 80′s, the city was just saturated with it, walls, poles, windows…Kids were devoted and cops were dealing with the Bloods and Crips war, making LA an open season canvas for wild lettering. For an
8 year old kid from Minneapolis who loved to read, the city was a Rosetta Stone of garish visual violence, plastered with rough and crazy scripts that seemed to threaten my eyes with switchblades… each graffiti tag told a story of situation, context, personage and meaning that I would never know – and the mystery drove me further to understand graffiti writing, but purely from a standpoint of fascination with the compulsion, criminality and complexity of it. I always wrote on the side, but never with the intent to [write graffiti], more to cultivate my own reactionary code to the phenomena of tagging. My modern devotion to calligraphy just happened two years ago — I was “unceremoniously” ejected from a pre-Master’s program in ceramics and, the morning after, found my first Parallel Pen and began to write. It kinda just evolved from there…

 

How did you first learn or practice calligraphy?
I sat at a coffee shop for hours and practiced really deconstructed letter forms. Pulling influences from all different forms of graffiti and trying to make my own hybrid code language, never really touching the rudiments but still practicing enthusiastically. It wasn’t until about 6 months later when I was working as an arts teacher at a children’s camp that summer and met Melissa McCarthy, who operates an awesome space in Laconia, NH called The Studio (hi Mel!!). She was a self-proclaimed “ex-calligrapher” but could wield a pen quite ferocious. She showed me a few rare old books, I ordered them off of Amazon and started to see that there was really a deep history to what I was getting into — I had the feeling it would benefit me to know where I think I’m coming from and so I started practicing round-nib caps with a Speedball B on Japanese graph paper. Eventually I started to get a little hang of it and, now, if I’m lucky, I can make a few letters in a row that don’t look like they are missing a chromosome.

 

Do you have books that you would recommend for those interested in beginning calligraphy?
There’s a few that I want to give props to and a few that I want to tell you about, but you have to earn the latter… I believe in no free lunches, everything I learned I hungered for. Definitely get a copy of “The Mystic Art of Written Forms” by Friedrich Neugebauer, that is ridiculously essential and is my go to for everything book. Another one that is super slept on and comprehensive for technique (though you should practice for hours anyway to make and break your bad habits) is Pen Calligraphy, Course One by John W. Cataldo. I’m sure there are others — come to Germany and see what they have here, it will blow your mind.

Do you have friends/colleagues that are also practicing calligraphers whose work you recommend that I look at?
There’s a lot of people making noise because of Instagram / Facebook / etc, but I never see anything that makes me fall in love, a lot of it is trying to look like Ed Hardy t-shirts or something that would get you a logo designing job through Tumblr or something, I’m not trying to hate, it’s just that when I go to the secret room in the arts library here in Berlin and manage to get access to the original calligraphy manuals from the 16th-17th century, the stuff they are doing is so much more soulful, passionate and exciting. If anything, I would say look to the past. Back then, people had to work so much harder to fine-tune their relationships to the body, mind and aesthetics to produce things that looked near-perfect. Today people use computers in all manner and form, and you have no idea what it is on a screen you are looking at. Go to your nearest university arts library and see what they have, ask a friend if they know anyone who’s into calligraphy. It’s about people, not a dog-and-pony popularity contest.

 

You were involved with music before you became interested in calligraphy? Are there any parallels between the two art forms that you see?
There is much to say on this that can’t be described, only played / written. Everyone has their different approaches,but for me, calligraphy is like improvising a modern symphony, with me running around to each section trying to play all the instruments at the same time. The arts of hip hop (rapping, dj’ing, graffiti and breakdancing) are really a deconstructed jazz idiom, and there are definite parallels to what I’m doing and deconstructed jazz- you have to play the right mood, feel out the crowd, tell your truth, have your rhythm be on point yet sharp, stay funky yet precise, just get into it and let it reveal itself to you.

You seem to love calligraphy. Can you talk about how you feel about calligraphy?
Calligraphy is deep to human beings as a species. It is us leaving an articulate mark for other human beings to follow suit and uphold a vow to attempt to ascend to greatness. I’m sure Shoe would tell you something very different, but for me I think calligraphy is one of the only things that can redeem us as a species. I love the letter forms and I love destroying them as well. I love how calligraphy makes language come alive..I was recently doing some signage for a local Italian restaurant in a very severe Fraktur and a friend commented, “You know Dru, I think you’re the only person who can make the phrase “caramelized onion” look absolutely terrifying.” I thought that was a good way too sum up how awesome calligraphy is. It’s alive as much as you are alive. For me it is a deep offering to people. I wonder sometimes if it could save the world, and then I read the news for five minutes and abandon that notion in favor of working harder :).

 

Are there calligraphy projects that you worked on that you loved? Can you talk about those projects?
So far, all of them. I have designed a clothing line for Europe’s biggest online fashion retailer Zalando, which comes out in August, and I have two major solo exhibitions happening a week apart in Chicago in September. Just yesterday I set up a small table at the most popular flea market in Berlin and wrote postcards for people for 10 hours — all of these projects are valuable and wonderful, even if there are speedbumps or difficulties. I truly just love working, I love being of use.

 

Do you have any future projects coming up that you would like to talk about?
I am painting a huge space for my first big-time international solo exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, which opens the 12th of September, and then the day after I have to paint a mural for the Poetry Foundation in Chicago over two days, and the opening for that is the 19th (I think).

 

Do you have any advice for someone just beginning with calligraphy?
1. Read a lot, but don’t read like Cat Warriors or cheesy contemporary fiction with Photoshop covers- read Faulkner, Somerset Maugham, Rilke, Japanese poetry from the 19th century, non-fiction, writing with history and substance. You are part of this history and substance.

2. Begin to know yourself and write the things you begin to know (or are curious about).

3. Disappoint yourself. Mess up wildly. Make errors over and over again. The only way you can fix something wrong with your calligraphy is tenacity.

4. Start, and intend to finish, even if its one stroke, one paragraph, one page.

5. Don’t compare yourself to the people of today, compare yourself to the masters of the past.

6. Be patient as weeds sitting in a still pond.

 

 

Read the full article here: http://calligraphyjourney.wordpress.com/about/drury-brennan/