And the Joys of the Internet
We have lived through so many changes that it is easy to take them for granted. Yet I am still delighted by what the internet can make possible, especially the unexpected connections.
Today I want to tell you about my friend Jack, whom I have never met in person. The story began like this.
I had uploaded a short video introducing my calligraphy. It had already led to book projects. Then an email arrived with three stills from the video and a question: were those works for sale? Having received a few scam enquiries before, I was briefly suspicious. Then I noticed the sender: Jack Dorner, an ‘old friend’. How had that happened?
By then I had been selling art and collectibles online for more than twenty years, including antique chromolithographs. Jack had bought perhaps twenty over the years. Eventually we began corresponding in more detail, and he showed me what he was making with them. I was delighted: highly original shower-curtain designs and other decorative work. He also makes finials.
The Calligraphy Project
Now he was interested in my calligraphy. He kindly sent a photograph after the first work had been framed. The frame gives it room and shows it beautifully.
The other works of mine are still being framed, he says. Soon after, the next one was finished and it looks good too.
The Collaboration
Jack is an artist too, whatever his modest disclaimers. His work has a cool elegance, quite different from my own approach. He asked whether I would consider adding calligraphy to one of his pieces. He would send the originals, which I could keep; he wanted a copy of the result. The prospect of bringing these different approaches together appealed to me, and I accepted.
I did not want to spoil a colleague’s work by rushing in. I began by printing copies and using them for studies.
The first attempt looks like this. I’m not very enthusiastic about it myself, but Jack seems very pleased.
I then asked whether I could take some of his other work in a different direction. Again, he was enthusiastic. I deliberately chose a difficult starting point: a stark black-and-white composition whose forms seemed as fixed as rock.
These were my first experiments.
I had made only four or five studies at this point. They were playful experiments; I did not yet know where they might lead. The first came about while I was listening to Black Market by Weather Report.
A Trio
I had also been working with Wolfgang Kubin. Jack and Wolfgang were both seventy-seven at the time of this post, and both very productive. I liked the thought of bringing these friendships into one project, so I made a cover proposal for Kubin’s book about Li Bai using one of our experiments.
These were still tentative steps. To keep the exchange moving, I sent the first work back to Jack so he could continue. If he reached an impasse, he could send it back and I would take another turn. A work in progress, in the most literal sense.
I could not yet judge what would come of it, but I was glad to have tried. Exchange across continents has always mattered to me. Here it had become something we could pass back and forth, adding to it without quite knowing where it would end.
Related articles: Project in the Home Straight – Almost · Cover for a Book · Two Book Covers and One Dragon
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