An unforgettable experience: watching the calligrapher Donald Jackson, quill in hand, write small and perfectly formed italic letters on parchment the colour of alabaster. His back straight, his face gently inclined and his whole being channeled through shoulder, arm, wrist, finger and pen to the point where pen, ink and parchment meet. Time stood still. The calligrapher was no longer there. Only the interaction of movement and materials. I have never seen such concentration and easy flow and have rarely achieved it myself in all the years that followed.
What is the experience of the writer at this moment? The emotions are strong but the heart does not rush. The tactile sensation of parchment, the most sublime partner for a well-sharpened quill pen, verges on the erotic. Time and place shrink to the point of the pen and its caress of the parchment. If one thinks, it is to agree with the moment, that all is right, all is here.
Another experience, more personal this time. I had spent more than a month making a sculpture in plaster, a woman with bare breasts and veiled face: Maria Magdalena. The intention from the beginning was to cover her body in sgraffito. But when the moment came, the moment in which I would mar the beautiful plaster skin with the first scratch of the knife, I hesitated. My mind filled with a month of meditation on the “Noli me tangere” story, and I was overwhelmed with sadness. Why can I not touch you now, now that it is all over, now the happy ending has been revealed? Why another mystery when a simple touch would heal everything?
And then I started to carve the words of my sorrow into the skin, cutting awkwardly, because a knife in plaster can be nothing but awkward. The scraping and scratching were the perfect physical expression of my emotions, emotions brought to the surface by the episode in the biblical garden. The words were unplanned, certainly not written out beforehand. They were deeply felt. The knife and the plaster, the curves of the body, these all gave shape to the letters and the language in perfect symbiosis. I suppose the concentration was like that of Donald Jackson with his quill and parchment. But I cannot speak as an outside observer. Certainly there was no calm. My heart rate was dangerously high. And when the writing was done, I was exhausted.
There are two kinds of calligraphy, that which serves the text and that which is born in the same moment and with the same action as the text. I believe these are fundamentally different activities, though am not sure how to back up this statement. One requires planning, a restricted set of movements (the Latin alphabet is made up of a few basic strokes, combined in rather limited ways) and an even temperament (if the script is to remain the same from beginning to end). The other is spontaneous, rushes back and forth from visual to verbal stimuli, uses a wide range of strongly contrasting shapes and movements and can change fundamentally during the process of writing.
Gesture is inherent in both types of calligraphy, though they are perhaps of different kinds. Before the age of the Baroque writing masters, gesture is present only sporadically in Western writing. I suspect that the wax tablets of the ancient Romans and medieval scholastics were far more calligraphic than the formal documents they have left us. Book scripts are by definition gridded, the letters and lines of writing confined to small, orderly units. Rustic capitals, uncials, Gothic textura, rotunda and even Renaissance italics follow this basic principle. On occasion letters or orthographic signs leap out into gesture, rejoicing for a moment in the free space of the margin. But papyrus paper and parchment are wretched surfaces for gestural forms. Take a quill pen and rush a line across parchment and the most you can expect is a dry, incomplete line with a splatter in the tightest part of the curve. Parchment is not made for expression or experiment.
The age of paper introduced new possibilities for the calligrapher. Its low cost, relative to parchment, encouraged a more generous use of white space. The rise of business correspondence gave scribes the incentive to show off their skills in order to impress clients. The great clouds of flourishes surrounding the text block of Baroque documents are exuberant displays of bravura and confidence. They were made with gestures that engaged the entire arm from the shoulder in a series of well-rehearsed and rather limited movements: ovals, reversed ogival curves and interwoven ‘lines of beauty’. The greatest sin in Baroque calligraphy is a curve that does not flow, a line with a nervous twitch. There must never be even a hint of hesitation.
The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, in their own way, follow this Baroque principle. To watch the films of the great man at work is to see a kind of ritual in paint. The choreography is repetitive, as he reaches out again and again to throw paint off the end of his brush. The arm moves through the same arc, rarely taking an unexpected turn. Line after line is thrown onto the canvas. Pollock engages his entire body but does not make radical moves. It is a primitive dance, limited, hypnotic. Each parabola of paint merges with the rest. A simple pattern emerges. The shapes are very similar to those of Baroque calligraphy: ovals, loops and switchback curves. The comparison stops there, of course, because the splatters, drips and irregularities of Pollock’s seed-sowing gesture are filled with his personal energy.
What, then, is the difference between an expressive mark and one that remains within the boundaries of its own discipline? My first impulse is to say that the latter strives for technical perfection. But is technical perfection inimical to the expression of emotions? Not to the pianist or ballet dancer, surely. And if techne precedes expression, does it disappear in the process or shine through in the final artefact? For centuries the answer to this question would seem to have been that technical expertise and years of disciplined study were the foundation of freedom.1 The oil sketches of the great masters represent this kind of freedom, guided and secured by the tether of life drawing and perspective studies (Kemp, 1974).
The modern period has replaced this ‘freedom to’ with a ‘freedom from’. The Dada period represents a strong break with the idea of art as emerging from the study of earlier art (Andel, 2002: 124ff). The trauma of war, Freud’s theory of the subconscious and the shock of Cubism combined to cut the tether of discipline.2 The only honest gesture available to the artist would henceforth be the one emerging from spontaneous, authentic emotion.3 Training, discipline and any reference to tradition would simply limit the natural expression of the artist and must be done away with.4
Calligraphy, with its reliance on language, is an interesting practice through which to study the ‘freedom from–freedom to’ debate. The strategies used by contemporary Western calligraphers often reveal specific received ideas about the nature and meaning of gestures and their relationship to writing and artistic creation. These strategies fall roughly into a number of very imprecise categories. I made use of most of them during my thirty years as a professional calligrapher. Perhaps it would be useful to describe why I adopted or rejected each of these strategies. At every stage I attempted to discern what the essence and function of calligraphy might be at the dawn of the computer age.
A legible script is by definition a historical script. The conventions of reading and writing are established, if subject to evolutionary development. All calligraphers learn a series of basic ‘hands’ taken from history. When these are mastered they are then pushed by their teachers or their own insights and artistic ambition to develop these scripts further, to give them a personal interpretation.
Roman capitals, Carolingian minuscule and Renaissance italics remain the basic teaching scripts, for the obvious reason that they are the written versions of the letterforms used for print. The structure of italics, which are written with a gentle, zigzagging up-and-down motion, has proved very popular with calligraphers searching for new, more gestured forms of writing (Leterme, 2012). The movements inherent in italic lend themselves more easily to gesture than the rounded forms of Roman capitals and Carolingian minuscules. A circle is a tricky thing to write in a gestural way. The oval O of italics, when written large and with a gestural movement, flows easily from the elbow.
The personal interpretation of historical scripts does not have to be done at higher speed than otherwise, but calligraphers tend to think that speed will lead to a more dynamic, personal and contemporary style of writing. This is true also of contemporary Arabic, Chinese and Japanese calligraphers. Speedily gestured writing would seem to be more authentic and to represent a break with functional, legible, carefully written scripts.
My earliest attempt to break free from the ‘shackles’ of formal writing was the work I did for the film Prospero’s Books. Here I was asked to write in the style of Shakespeare, but at greater speed, wielding the pen as an actor strutting his stuff for the camera. Speed was necessary to make the filmed writing worth watching—normal writing speed is boring to watch and much slower than reading speed. Developing a camera-friendly, lively Shakespearean hand was a fascinating learning process. I began by slowly copying Shakespeare’s signature (authentic or not but, in any case, done at speed), then developing the rest of the alphabet to match it and, finally, speeding up over a period of weeks until I could write it at more than normal speed. I then added dramatically altered shapes (always staying within the style), pen pressure and a rocking movement of the hand to create a script that would enchant on screen.
The results on screen are really quite powerful. The script has remained a workhorse for the rest of my career, frequently requested by clients for all sorts of commissions on paper and other surfaces. The reason must be that the exaggerated movement and variation that I brought to the historical script represents history for the client more powerfully than the rather tame script I copied in the first place. Speed, inkiness, roughness, splatters, arrhythmic and forward-tumbling letters are an icon of history, if not an accurate imitation of history.
The next stage in my calligraphic development began in a workshop with the German calligrapher Hans-Joachim Burgert, who applied the principles of Gestaltung to letterforms. Burgert is without doubt the most important theoretician of calligraphy in the modern period (Burgert, 2002). His formal analytical approach led him to study historical scripts, non-Latin scripts and every form of sign and mark in search of new graphic principles. These he applied to the Latin alphabet, freeing it from the grid to which Phoenician scribes had confined it.
Burgert’s formal analysis allowed him to describe all scripts with the same language. Arabic script could be compared to Latin script and, by doing so, demonstrates the relatively restricted formal range of Latin letters compared to their Arabic cousins. The richness and variety of Chinese calligraphy suddenly yielded, at least for me, lessons that could be applied to my own writing. It was not necessary to imitate Chinese brushwork but to see the difference in density, direction, stroke length and quality inherent in all Chinese writing and then to find a way to apply these observations to the Latin alphabet.
For me it was a revolutionary insight. My Shakespeare hand was still partially constrained by the Latin grid. This gave it its legibility but limited formal experimentation. By setting aside the grid and allowing letters to extend or contract into dramatic graphic ensembles, a new way of writing emerged. Legibility suffered, but the image of the text was considerably strengthened. The horizontal extension of certain letterforms, so characteristic of Arabic calligraphy, could be applied to Latin letters too.5 The arm could now move in all directions, changing letterforms at will to create relationships from form to form and from line to line.
At this time I made a work called Please Analyze. Written with a pen made from a cola can on a surface of textured whitewash, the piece incorporated rhythms and forms characteristic of Chinese and Arabic calligraphy. It has been on my website ever since and has drawn comment from the beginning. The reason would seem to be that the writing is clearly in the Latin alphabet but in every other way declaring allegiance to Arabic and Chinese calligraphy. The letters leap across the page, reflecting precise but lively movements of the arm. There is little of the automatic repetition of Pollock to be found here. The forms are more varied, emerging as they do from the dictates of the text. More gestural possibilities emerge when L follows P, E follows L, A follows E and so on than when one throws paint again and again with the same movement of the arm.
The concept of artistic authenticity has frequently been expressed in contemporary art by the use of handwriting. (e.g. Barthes, 1979) Handwriting would seem to stand for the honest, straightforward statement of the artist. In a painting, quotidian script represents unfiltered, direct language, coming straight from the heart. In his blackboard paintings, Cy Twombly reduced handwriting to repetitive chalky scribbles on a black ground (Glozer, Greub, Schama, and Varnadoe, 2011). Are we to understand these works, freed from all linguistic content, as even more direct statements of authenticity? His uncoiling line, whether gently oval or more aggressively jagged, is untouched by any Western traditions of drawing or representation. It emerges from a world that gave birth to no art in our history. The works are seemingly self-generated and self-generating. Are they for this reason more personal, truer?
Many artists and calligraphers have made use of the scribble.6 It is perhaps the one area in which contemporary calligraphy overlaps to some extent with contemporary art. I have made frequent use of writing that explores the territory between handwriting (legible or not), scribbles based on letters and self-consciously calligraphic writing. My tool of choice for these works was the quill pen but one used and abused to make writing much larger than the tool would comfortably make. What was once intimate, handheld, is now monumental, to be read or seen at a distance. The works are mainly on canvases, sometimes white, sometimes with washes of earth pigments. The roughness of the cloth causes the pen to bite, cut and scratch the surface and to judder at every turn. The texts, composed spontaneously, were strongly influenced by the tactile experience of writing. Words of doubt, lament, hesitation and confusion seemed to come from the very process of writing. The rough surface, frustrating any fluid movement, dictated its own words to my obedient hand.
These works usually contain a legible word or phrase in the mass of scribbles, smears and cancellations. The confessional nature of the text drove me to frustrate reading. One does not want to reveal too much. But a few words can, with some effort, be picked out. These may lead to the deciphering of other words. And from there one can guess at the gist of the whole text. The viewer becomes complicit in the meaning of the work.
The temptation is always strong to grab a large Chinese brush and splash down a few big, drippy, abstract marks in imitation of the Zen masters. It is a temptation to be avoided. Sadly, many Western calligraphers succumb, giving yet more insights into the ‘freedom to–freedom from’ debate. Chinese calligraphy requires years to master. The finely pointed Chinese brush is more flexible than its Western counterpart but also more difficult to control. One spends years learning exactly where the fibers will be at every turn and how to realign them as one lifts the brush in order to prepare for the next stroke. The beauty of Chinese calligraphy, its graphic richness and expressive power, all come from this discipline as it takes flight.
Latin calligraphy has its own disciplines of course, but they do not compare to the rigor of Chinese training. Nor do the Latin letters have the graphic complexity and variety of kanji. It is tragic to see so much incompetent pseudo-Chinese brushwork in Western calligraphy. The questions are, What do these works attempt to achieve? What are these calligraphers looking for?
Contemporary calligraphy would seem to have, as its principle goal, the living mark. There is as much abstract or semi-abstract as legible calligraphy today, so one cannot say that the process is necessarily language driven. Rather, it seems to be driven by a desire to express and record energy and movement: to record, as it were, a kinetic experience. In the Chinese tradition, the kinetic record is not the point. The mental process or state that created the movement and what this tells about the character of the writer—that is the point (Barrass, 2002: 15).
Most Western attempts at gestural brushwork are simply posturing. The discipline that would focus mind and hand is not present. Weak forms reveal weak characters (in the Chinese version of graphology), or at least a rather feeble tradition of mark making.
I have not always succeeded in avoiding this pitfall. One work, Meister, sails around the issue probably fairly well. The letters were written with a large Chinese brush, but they remain legible and do not gesture at the oriental tradition. The trail of ink droplets, splatters, hand-smeared serifs and deliberately incompetent letterforms suggest another world, that of psychological struggle. The word Meister, chosen after long deliberation, is abused of its normal meaning. Master of what? Here the shape of the word interrogates its meaning. Is it calligraphy? Definitely, if calligraphy is taken to mean the deliberate shaping of writing to give new meaning to language.
Shadows is a performance piece developed with composer Jeroen D’hoe in 2010.7 My research for the piece led me to experiment with Japanese kozo paper. Large sheets, stretched on frames, separated me from the audience, for whom I was only a shadow. I wrote on one side, the public watched from the other. The ink needed to soak through immediately to be visible to the public. I took a wrong turn in my thinking about the performance (which would take too many words to explain here), and it was not a success.
The experiments with kozo paper, however, opened up wonderful new possibilities. Marks, writing, gestures, no matter how large, absorbed into the paper, recording every subtle trace of their making. But by soaking in, they became dematerialised. There was no tangible paint layer. The works done in this way have an almost photographic smoothness, an unreality that contradicts the powerful energy of the brushstrokes. These are clearly artefacts, but they do not easily reveal the process of their making. The gesturing hand is both present and sublimated.
In several of the kozo sheets I have used large, abstract gestures with no clear relationship to writing. This would normally trouble me, as a linguistic element, no matter how attenuated, drives both the mental and physical processes involved in my calligraphy. But here the abstract marks take on a floating, dynamic unreality of their own. They occupy an undefined space, simultaneously things and nothing at all. I find these works eerie. They make reference to the Chinese tradition but in their colouration break radically from all conventional understanding of brushwork, discipline and freedom.
Industrial and technical processes allow for a dramatic scaling up of calligraphy. Peter Greenaway’s sound and light installation Bologna Towers 2000 projected the pen in action onto the buildings of the city’s Piazza Maggiore. Movements of the hand no more than a few centimeters in any direction became vast arcs of energy encompassing entire facades. The ordering principle of writing, from left to right, top to bottom, letter by letter, controlled and directed these monumentally enlarged gestures. The materiality of the writing was enhanced and transformed by the architectural elements onto which it was projected. Letters were decorated by cornices, inhabited by viewers standing on balconies, textured by ancient brickwork.
The calligraphy rehearsed the city’s history, interlacing it with fictive stories about the great towers that once stood thick as a small forest in the city center. The forms of the writing were historical, each episode in its appropriate style. Some events deviated from this rule and were written in styles that expressed the meaning of the event: hacking movements of a metal pen accompanied the barbarian invasions; stiff, vertical letters marched through the Fascist era; letters bleeding into porous paper visualised a Nazi massacre. The technology transferred these calligraphic experiments from paper to wall, transforming Gothic and Baroque letters into contemporary artistic expressions. The camera records, the projector transmits the writing warts and all, allowing the public to see the ink before it dries. This privilege is usually denied to all but the calligrapher him- or herself.
The ability of technology to give new life to historical and quotidian scripts is more evident still in a series of word sculptures I made for the city of Bruges in 2010. These Metaalgrenzen (metal borders), standing as much as six metres high, were laser cut from steel, assembled, painted white and installed in parks around the city.
Laser cutting requires vectors, and vectors require the calligraphy to be translated into a digital language. A form of dishonesty enters the process here, as real gestures are simplified and abstracted into shapes that suggest gesture. The inkiness of letters is reduced to a ‘representation’ of itself. Movement and rhythm, the thick and thin of a broad-edged pen are all reinterpreted to satisfy the laser and the structural demands of the sculpture.
It is fair to ask if this process of retouching and simplifying is fundamentally different to the retouching done with pen and ink in the normal process of writing. Most calligraphers, in spite of the Chinese injunction to leave all marks as they first come, will go back and retouch curves that do not quite flow and lines that are too thin, uneven or ragged.
Analog and digital retouching have very little in common. Retouching with pen and ink can only go so far. Ink loosens the fibers of the paper and can lead to bleeding. Letters quickly become overworked. It takes a skilled hand and a very well-trained eye to make adjustments that will be invisible to the viewer. This in itself is already a form of trickery or dishonesty: to make movements seem spontaneous and flowing when, in fact, they stumbled somewhere along the way.
Digital retouching takes two forms. Both are applied to writing that has usually been generated on paper with pen and ink and then scanned. The first form of retouching is a drawing process using either mouse or stylus. I prefer a stylus, which gives greater control and precision. The stylus allows one to go back and forth between black and white, and this ad infinitum. The only limits are one’s patience and sense of perfection. A line can be thickened and made to flow more consistently. But one can also add splatters after the fact, remove letters and replace them with others and generally rework the entire calligraphic composition.
Digital retouching assumes that the final product will be printed, laser cut or produced by some other technological process. You cannot print out an original piece of calligraphy, even if that is what you scanned in! Digitisation is an irreversible process.
The second method, commonly used for logotypes (that will be enlarged and reduced in size according to need), is vectoring. This is also necessary for film cutting, laser cutting and so on. Vectoring involves adjusting Bezier curves by pulling on their ‘handles’ until the curve takes the desired form. Vectors allow for a phenomenal degree of perfection, but are very labor intensive. One easily loses sight of the whole design as one zooms in to a tiny detail to make a microscopic correction. Where retouching with stylus tests one’s patience, retouching with vectors challenges one’s sanity. It is the ultimate interface between calligraphy and the digital world.
In this digital realm, the effect of a vectored gesture is perhaps no more dishonest than a gesture retouched by hand with ink. One could even argue that the opposite is true. The digital letterform is assumed to be manipulated, the handwritten form is not. This would go some way to explain why clients for handwritten calligraphy frequently opt for rough and inconsistent writing. It seems to declare its handmade origins in a world of mechanical letters: this was written by hand; it is not a calligraphic font; it is real.
Artists such as Otto Zitko, Luca Barcellona and Al Seed expand the handwritten mark to very large-scale compositions without the intervention of technology. Zitko’s wandering lines cover entire spaces: walls, ceilings, doors and windows. The lines are seemingly too long and too far off the floor to have been made in one movement by a man with metre-long arms. A giant must have entered the space and disfigured them with these wordless, brightly coloured scribbles. Barcellona takes the precise letterforms of medieval manuscripts and enlarges them to billboard size. Here we are treated to a dragged dry brush mark that declares its immediacy in no uncertain terms. No machine could do this, these letters proclaim. Al Seed responds to architectural contexts with compositions so rich in colour and so precise in execution that one is reminded of Islamic manuscript illumination but cross-bred with graffiti and occupying a similar space in the public realm; what was small, intimate and private becomes vast and accessible to all. The growing popularity of these three artists (and artists like them) suggests an insatiable hunger for the mark of the human hand in public spaces. It is interesting here to note that, before the Maoist Revolution, art in public spaces in China was virtually always calligraphy (Barrass, 2002: 42–43). In historical times no public space was occupied by a bronze statue of a hero or even of the emperor himself. His calligraphy, yes; his image, never.
Calligraphers today have a remarkable arsenal of pens, brushes and other mark-making tools. This is a new development. For two millennia Chinese calligraphy was done with a brush on silk or paper. The brushes varied in size and in the stiffness of the bristles but rarely in form. A Chinese brush comes to a fine point but can be opened out with pressure to create marks of many thicknesses. Roman writers had reed pens and metal styluses on wax tablets. Arabic writers historically used almost exclusively reed pens on paper polished to the smoothness of ivory. European scribes were content to use a quill pen on parchment for many centuries, switching to metal pens only in the early 19th century. The arsenal of an historical calligrapher was very limited indeed.
Today a calligrapher will have quill pens, reed pens, ruling pens, cola can pens, comb pens, balsa wood pens, cloth pens, folded pens, markers, brushes, sticks, bones and anything else that can transfer ink from the inkwell to the paper. It is a remarkable development, and one worth considering. This obsession with new tools indicates an obsession with new qualities of line. Each tool makes its own range of marks, some ragged, some smooth, some large and heavy and others small and fine. Some encourage the expression of strong emotions; others, quiet the soul and lead to considered, delicate writing. Does the modern calligrapher expect more from the tool than his or her historical counterpart? Does he or she expect that the tool will create the emotion, will generate the forms automatically, simply by choosing that tool and dipping it in the ink? If this is true, does it mean that an expressive mark comes not from following a practice (freedom to) but from setting aside a known practice and launching out into unknown territory with a tool that one hardly knows how to control (freedom from)?
For these questions there are no simple answers. The materiality of writing is clearly the core motivation: to write, make marks, give new shape to letters and new emotional registers to the texts we transcribe and to do this with tools that take us away from habitual practices and intensify the experience of writing in the moment. If the calligrapher composes his or her own texts, so much the better. If this happens spontaneously, with a back-and-forth action between writing, thinking and writing again, a unique symbiosis can be the result. The form and content of language can come closer to unity than perhaps in any other process of writing. This would be a calligraphy worthy of the name.
1Vasari says of Cimabue, “Nature, however, aided by constant practice, enabled him greatly to surpass both in design and colouring the masters who had taught him.” The question of artistic inspiration and the sources of artistic originality and genius have vexed the greatest minds of art history since the 19th century. The concept of disegno is central to most studies, which see, in the 16th century, a slow and inconsistent splitting of disegno into two artistic faculties or skills, the one purely intellectual, merging with the concept ‘idea’, and the other practical, coming close to the modern concept of design. In both manifestations, disegno is the process by which the formal laws of nature, the proportio of all living things, are expressed as line and subsequently given expression in painting, sculpture and architecture (Cennini adds the art of the goldsmith to this constellation). All artistic creation starts with drawing, and drawing starts with the observation of the proportio of the natural order. Early sources do not speak specifically of artistic freedom, but refer constantly to the need for diligent work over many years in order to achieve artistic competence and truth to nature. Karel Van Mander (Barrass 2002: 15) can easily speak for the majority of early authors on this subject: Als ghij de handt hebt wacker sonder swaerheyt Ny ghemaeckt, door oeffeninghe gheduldich, En d’ooghen aenvanghen te hebben claerheyt, Gaet van de vercieringhe totter waerheyt, Dat is, tot het leven ons meest ghehuldich, In welck een doenlijcke soetheyt eenvuldich. Porecht is blijckend’ in’t stilstaen en rueren Dat zy u Leydsterr’, om tschip nae te stueren.
2Jean Arp writes that he “rejected all mimesis and description, giving free reign to the Elementary and Spontaneous. Since the arrangement of planes and their proportions and colours seemed to hinge solely on chance, I declared that these works were arranged ‘according to the law of chance’ as part of an inexplicable reason, of an inaccessible order” (1604: chapter 2). If this is indeed the case with the artistic process, then talent and training have nothing to do with the quality of the outcome. One throw of the dice does not abolish the laws of chance.
3“Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” (Jones 2014: 141).
4In his discussion of Picasso’s break with tradition, Lynton makes clear that the avant-garde relied on strong academic training. Few artists of the early 20th century were outsiders to the academy (Breton 1924).
5Daniel M. Berry (Lynton 1980: 60–63): “This stretching is called keshide in both Arabic and Persian, from the Persian word keshidan, which means ‘to stretch’. In Arabic and Persian, there are two kinds of stretching: 1. stretching of the connection to the last connecting-previous letter in a line or words. 2. stretching of the last stretchable letter in a line or words.”
6Andre Breton, Francis Picabia, Theo van Doesburg, Cy Twombly, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, Otto Zitko, et al.
7The music for Shadows can be heard on www.jeroendhoe.org.
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