Headstone in Cumbrian greenslate
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Headstone in Cumbrian greenslate | ||
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I submitted this piece to the RDS Crafts competition in 2000 and wrote the following note to accompany it:
Inscription in welsh slate 10"× 19"
Designed 1993-1999
Lettering v-incised and painted
This text is to my mind one of the most beautiful in the whole of scripture, summing up simply and concretely the infinite solicitude of the Almighty towards His creation. It occurs in Isaiah’s prophecy of the Suffering Servant and thus refers directly to the Messiah—I mention this merely to indicate that the words are not insignificant, which will explain I hope why I returned again and again to it over a period of six years before I was satisfied with it.
My intention during these redraftings & modifications—from changes to the overall layout to minute adjustments to parts of individual letters—was, that where the words suggest gentleness, restraint, respect for difference, unity in diversity, fluid flickering movement contemplative attention to the smallest changes of state and all the other nuances that meditation on their meaning brings to light, that each of these qualities should also be present in the visual form I gave them.
Lettering designers are handicapped in the way their work is received by the public since good lettering design is, in the words of the printing historian Beatrice Warde, ‘a crystal goblet’ which we are schooled from our earliest years to look through, perceiving only its contents & never the art of the goblet-maker himself. The tacit prejudice that results from this is something that those who are fascinated by the shapes of letters are constantly running up against. Because of this I have decided to include the following comment from one of the judges on the Letter Arts Review Annual international competition this year: ‘I thought the strongest formal works were those carved in stone. One piece in particular stood out, a widely spaced inscription in slate with letterforms of extraordinary subtlety and understated movement. It shows what can be achieved by paring things down to their essence. It is one of the finest pieces of lettering I have seen. Later I learn that it is by Gareth Colgan from Ireland.’