Tom Greensfelder says identifying himself as a calligrapher provokes a predictable reaction. “It’s sort of like telling people you’re a communist,” Greensfelder says. “They think of it as sort of quaint.”
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Greensfelder began studying calligraphy–everything from uncial, the script of ancient Romans and Irish monks, to the flowing copperplate commonly used today–in the mid-1970s in San Francisco. He studied under Thomas Ingmire, a calligrapher who started taking liberties in his work, experimenting with abstract-expressionist form. In many calligraphic artists’ work today, words are submerged in colors and forms, or they don’t make sense at all–letters are used only for the elegance of their lines. Others are moving away from the cliche of allowing the meanings of words to guide the illustration (such as making the letters in the word loud extremely large and colorful), instead using abstract imagery to reflect ideas in the text.
Greensfelder invited calligraphers from the United States and Europe to submit pieces to “Beautifully Banal: The Last Calligraphy Show,” a title that deliberately plays off the form’s no-respect reputation. “A lot of other crafts have been recognized, like weaving and glassblowing and pottery,” he says. “Why is it that the art world has ignored calligraphy? Maybe it’s because calligraphers aren’t ironic enough. So the idea was, well, we’re going to be painfully ironic in the show so we finally get the respect we deserve.”
