Eliza Holliday Letterist.com: November 2010

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Sheila's Master Class

I was one of the privileged folks in this class of aspiring masters with a Master! Sheila Waters, doyenne of the calligraphic universe, has us live at her home in rural Pennsylvania where we sit and are SCRIBES for a week. On this "calligraphic vacation", we can live, breathe and eat calligraphy...well, we also did some breathing of fall air on long rural walks, and ate some delicious and nutritious food from her ample kitchen (yeah, trader joes!) and the awesome catered dinners....but this just allowed us to do more lettering for longer and longer! Many of us were working on roman variations: built-up versals, roman lower case, italic in endless variation...some focused on design, some guilding, and some of us just tried a little of everything we saw! Sheila has a huge basement studio with endless flat files of treasures, and she gave a daily demo in her areas of expertise: lettering, layout, color, and, in the photo here, her own tricks for laying gold...
Thanks to all who attended the October session for being so generous and for a relaxing but educational week (I have my "movie recommends" for the next year, I'll tell ya!) and those of you who also aspire to be mini-masters, look into this once-in-a-lifetime class!
PLEASE CLICK THE START ARROW TO WATCH THE SLIDE SHOW BELOW!

A Speech to the Garden Club of America

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre<
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.