Calligraphy as Art and Meditation: A New Approach
Hardcover with concealed spiral binding. Full color illustrations and diagrams. 272 pages.
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In Calligraphy as Art and Meditation, I offer a new paradigm for learning Western calligraphy. It emerged from a deep desire to create living letterform: calligraphy that infuses form with energy, movement, and feeling. My previous book, Finding the Flow: A Calligraphic Journey, resulted from a search for these qualities. However, I soon realized I’d only partially achieved my goal. Flow could not simply be injected into letters. How then could I merge flow with letterform? Given flow’s physical dimension, I began to conceive calligraphy holistically: as mind, body, and feeling interacting with verbal meaning. This enlarged perspective opened the gate to approaching calligraphy as art and meditation. My new goal was to find an encompassing paradigm for teaching this.
After six years of probing, I had a breakthrough: a tool-centered approach. Here, a tool is used as an extension of the calligrapher’s wholeness: head, hand, and heart. To introduce this as a felt experience, exercises using the “Prototool” – your index finger – connect you directly to the basic calligraphic act: directional movement through surface contact. This experience reveals the important role tool hold plays in translating a calligraphic intention into actual performance. It prepares you to investigate calligraphy through its tools. The familiar pencil awakens your body-mind to rhythmical, gestural movement; the Conte crayon sensitizes you to surface contact; and two-point tools pave the way for success with the edged pen. Through invented “training” alphabets, you combine these tool lessons with alphabet design, ductus, and dynamics (flow technique). In this merger of form and flow I hope you will discover a new, comprehensive template for creating vital letterform.
“Given flow’s physical dimension, I began to conceive calligraphy holistically: as mind, body, and feeling interacting with verbal meaning.”
Today’s calligraphy must, I believe, also be a wholehearted response to our time. How, then, might calligraphy offer students leading a fast-paced, stress-filled life find both a refuge and a way to experience the joy of creativity? I remembered that Zen Buddhists practice calligraphy to help calm the mind. I realized that meditation itself had many values/skills which might be helpful to calligraphic practitioners. From the beginning, Calligraphy as Art and Meditation uses the conscious breath to help you relax and enjoy the sensuous act of stroke making. Attention to process intensifies this moment-by-moment experience. Patience and kindness become antidotes to frustration and self-judgment. Calligraphy practiced as meditation invites you to slow down, grow your confidence, and enhance your well-being.
To develop calligraphy as an expressive art, you begin with the fundamentals of alphabet design, composition, and spacing. You investigate “calligraphic plasticity”: shortening, lengthening, and/or redirecting a stroke in response to letters preceding/following it. (Calligraphy is not type!) You awaken “calligraphic empathy”: the ability to translate verbal meaning into graphic elements. You cultivate felt, gestural movements through stroke techniques such as “bowing” (as if playing a violin). I warmly encourage you to enter these unexplored regions, to experience their untapped potential (and yours!) through structured exercises and guided play.
“My aim is vitality – for ourselves and for our letters. To realize this, we cultivate the qualities of movement, energy, rhythm, and feeling.”
And historical scripts? Naturally, these are an integral part of calligraphic instruction. However, I think it’s time to reconsider their role. First, the edged pen that produces most of them is too sophisticated for most beginners. Only near the close of my book, in the last two of my eleven training alphabets, do I offer Italic inventions for learning to operate and understand this tool’s potential. For me, historical alphabets are first symbols of a period’s history/values (important for their allusive power); and second, formal vocabularies available as a rich source for creative inspiration.
Learn about Gina’s other books and essays in the Publications section of Gina’s website.
Watch Gina Jonas demonstrate the relationship of flow and form:
Gina Jonas
Gina Jonas has worked as a professional calligrapher for over four decades, creating pieces for a variety of clients, teaching, and writing. She now dedicates her time to introducing a new approach to calligraphy through her book, Calligraphy as Art and Meditation: A New Approach. Her philosophy is that through the marriage of flow and form, you learn to create vital letterforms, alphabets, and word and text images.
Gina is also the author of Finding the Flow, a book that explores the energy, touch, and rhythmical movement essential to the living letterform: its flow, as well as Hebrew Calligraphy Styles.