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Finnegan's Facebook

1/22/2015

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FINNEGAN'S FACEBOOK
Calligraphy and Drawing by Thomas Ingmire
Text selections from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
San Francisco, CA, 2014
Unique Book
6" X 7 3/4",  38 pages housed in a plexiglass box 

While visiting the Bancroft Library on the UC Berkeley campus, I came across a manuscript  which had a collection of delightful Blackletter capitals that were decorated with amusing drawings of faces. This became the inspiration for the November 2014 Cafe Chronicles book.  The large capitals were initially created  in my studio followed by the drawings which were made each morning  at Cafe Puccini. The text passages, selections from Finnegans Wake, were added back in the studio. This book is the closest I come to having anything to do with the real world FACEBOOK (thumbs down).
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Remembering Arne Wolf

10/28/2014

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Arne Wolf, an Artist, teacher, and calligrapher passed away in the summer of 2013. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area calligraphy and book arts world. And for me, he was the most  influential person in the development of my experimental work and my exploration of calligraphy as an expressive art form. His words from critiques and lectures constantly served to challenge and inspire my work. Quotes from my journals follow. They are excerpts from an article I wrote for the FOC Autumn 2014 Journal (Volume 40, no.1).

On reconciling issues of lettering and art….

 “It is difficult to work on both sides of the issue. It is a painful process to move away from or to give up what has been drilled into us. As one moves toward art–– the logical extension is to give up lettering and move into painting.” 

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In his discussions on lettering and art, he couched his arguments in terms of the philosophical dichotomy between Apollonian and Dionysian which is inspired by Greek mythology. Dionysos, the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and chaos, contrasts with Apollo, the god of reason and the rational. When it came to calligraphy and art, Arne was a Dionysian man; a proponent of freedom and expression. 

“Visual splendor is Dionysian, legibility is Apollonian.” 

The Lindisfarne Gospels, a wonderful example of visual/verbal fusion is Dionysian while a page of capital quadrate is Apollonian. The Romans were “straight arrow”logical and controlled, not aesthetic (Apollonian), while the Greeks were the artists. Roman letters (Apollonian) are not emotional, but conservative and rational. The idea that an alphabet has to be uniform was a Roman idea. When the division between the text and image is clear, as in Renaissance manuscripts, the work is Apollonian. 

“The Renaissance looked backwards and was clarifying; it was not a revolution.” 

Arne viewed the Renaissance as a pragmatic period leading to typography which took the mystery out of writing. By contrast, the work of the Baroque period (Dionysian), free and exciting, was a swing against authority and pragmatism.


THE BATTLE BETWEEN DAVID AND GOLIATH  15” X 25 1/2” lino cut.  This is one image of ten sheets that are presented loose in a portfolio box.
 
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THE FIRST JOKE OF WILLINGDONE from Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce: Set in the Form of an Inventory of the Metal and Wood Typefaces in the Printing Studio of Arne Wolf Interspersed with Textual Textural Typographic Drawings

“Every good work of art has a quality of redemption.”

“I love ambiguity as a springboard for the imagination.”

“Historically the most creative work in lettering has involved capital letters. Minuscule writing has served more practical purposes.”

“The urge of the artist is to do something different––to change change. For anything to be art it has to be new.”


Arne described that the work of an artist had to grow out of passion and conviction. It is internal and involves putting one’s soul into the work. Commercial calligraphy, by contrast, is driven by external forces and this takes it out of the realm of being art. 

“Work comes from an impulse (time and precision has nothing to do with this).”

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 LOVE SHAKES MY HEART   A limited offset edition in black and grey tones by Arne. 100 images were signed, 100 without signatures. I remember seeing original paintings similar to this by Arne. The works were examples or Arne’s interest in visual/verbal fusion. He felt that lettering within a painting worked best if it was made by a mechanical means (usually stencil or rub on letters) as opposed to a calligraphic hand writing. A calligraphic hand and the expressive painting would always seem to be visually in conflict.


On the meaning of “content” Arne presented a number of thoughts:

“The transition from craft to art is equal to the movement from making letters to making content. Content equals the whole message, not just the verbal message.” 

“Letters are not human, but content is human.”

“Letters don’t give meaning, but the human does.”

“Words are expressed through letters, but content is not.”


On Books

“The definition of the so-called artist’s book is of absolutely no importance to me.”




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A gift from Fanny Renoir

7/8/2014

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This work is a gift from Fanny Renoir, a San Francisco Cafe Puccini  "Outsider" artist. I think the work is a wonderful example of the fusion of lettering and image. I wish that I could say that I did it. I am thinking however to use this as my next "business" card.

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Cage's Muses on Words, Art, and Music

6/6/2014

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CAGE’S MUSES ON WORDS, ART,  AND MUSIC
Writings by John Cage  
Calligraphy and Drawing by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, CA, 2014
Unique Book
14.5  x 10 inches,   20 pages

This book is a visual expression of  selections from Cage's percussive works and various thoughts on Words, art, and music. The “image only” pages of the book were created spontaneously while listening to  compositions from the Third Construction and Credo in US. The calligraphic texts, from Silence: Lectures and Writing by John Cage,  and Sounds of the Inner Eye, ed. by Wulf Herzogenrath and Andreas Kreul, attempt  also to portray images of visual musical. The book is now part of the  collection at the Library of Congress.

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Afghanistan

4/5/2014

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Calligraphy and Drawings by Thomas Ingmire
Poetry by Robert Sheppard
Musical composition by Clifford Burke
Unique Book
The images are a few pages from a visual/verbal book titled Afghanistan.  It is the result of a project that involved a series of back and forth collaborative responses  between myself and the poet, Robert Sheppard, and musician, Clifford Burke. Initially I created  a series of abstract calligraphic drawings which were presented to Robert. He chose one of the images and aligned it with the poem Afghanistan which was from a recently published collection of poems titled Warrant Error. Working with the chosen image and the poem, I developed a number of sheets...some images and some with the text. These were eventually assembled in book form and the poem was introduced, in brief phrases juxtaposed to the images. Clifford Burke, taking inspiration from the final book, created the musical score.  Three of the spreads are shown here. The work was part of a larger project involving eleven poets and three musicians.  The book is now part of the University of Denver,  Penrose Library, Special Collections.
AFGHANISTAN
Like a figure in a dream of perfect falling
Like something from somewhere like hell

You were the dark-eyed girl who crept out 
Before the pink meat dawn to spy
The growling machines while the whole town
Still dreamt of exactly what she saw

Night vision green flecked with sparks
And clouds of vectoral vapour pouring across
Sun-baked gravel where a human head severe
And severed scarved in crackling plastic 
Resurrected. She dived through coils of barbed wire

She ran her oily fingers along the sealed walls
Of the outsiders as though reading their secret script
Or leaving her own


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Cafe Chronicles, February 2014

3/2/2014

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Cafe Chronicles, February 2014
Calligraphy and Drawings by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, CA,  2013
Unique Book
5.5 x 7.5 inches,  36 pages
The February 2014 drawings were all done in Cafe Puccini. Many pages of the book had previously made calligraphic elements including letters from the alphabet, short texts, and abstract drawings. Also, towards the end of the month I added short poems and parts of poems by Kaye McDonough who I met one morning at the cafe.  "Paris in the twenties lasted forty years," is one of her poems. Kaye was a long time North Beach poet/resident who now lives and teaches on the East Coast. She was in town to do a reading at City Lights. I am thinking to continue with the idea of juxtaposing and drawing with a poem on a daily basis. It seems like an activity that  would  be good for one's mind.  It also enables me to explore curious relationships between words and image.
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Cafe Chronicles, December, 2013

1/5/2014

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Cafe Chronicles, December, 2013
Calligraphy and Drawings by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, CA,  2013
Unique Book
5.5 x 7.5 inches,  36 pages

The December drawings were all done in Cafe Puccini. Each month I try to  add or change my approach to creating the pages. Some months I have used color. Other months I have pasted collage elements on the pages before beginning. In months where I have not  made this kind of beginning, I wait for something to happen, or just enjoy  observing how the act of drawing each day changes what I do or how I see a page. In mid month of this book, for no explicable reason, I happened to change my process by creating  the drawings before writing the date; the result  being that the drawing and writing seemed to be more integrated both in character and  in composition. 
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Ode to Jackson Mac Low

12/9/2013

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Open Secrets: Ode to Jackson Mac Low
A visual/verbal Book by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, 2013 
Unique book
16 x 13 inches, 20 pages

Jackson Mac Low, (1922-2004) was an American Poet known particularly for his experimental approaches to poetry, musical compositions, and performance art.  Inspired in part by John Cage, Mac Low employed systematic chance operations and other similar non-intentional methods in his work. This book is a visual response to the audio performance work titled Open Secrets, by Jackson Mac Low and Anne Tardos. There are ten selections. Most of the works are multi-track voice compositions, while others are instrumental pieces. Specific words are sometimes discernible, but most of the time the voices are used as instruments of sound.

The pages of this book are visual mark making responses the Open Secrets pieces. The instrumental works are depicted with abstract marks, while the voice compositions have been created with layers of hand written and stencil made words. The book itself is an expression of sound. Some of the pages crackle when the pages are turned, others move in silence. 

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Suites Song

11/23/2013

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Suites Song
Poetry by Federico García Lorca
Drawings and calligraphy by Thomas Ingmire 
San Francisco, 2010
Unique book
7.75 x 10 inches, 28 pages

This book was inspired by my work with Manuel Neri and the poetry of Lorca. Most of the work that I had done with the collaboration had involved, for lack of better words, Lorca's more despairing poetry. I wanted to do something fairly straightforward with a few of his lighter, more playful poems. I chose three poems and balanced them against simple watercolor figure drawings. With the drawings I wanted to capture the directness and simplicity of form seen in Manuel Neri's drawings.



Suites Song is available from Vamp and Tramp Booksellers
Vamp and Tramp

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    Thomas Ingmire

    I I like the words of the poet, Juan Ramon Jimenez, "if they give you lined paper, turn it sideways." For calligraphy to become relevant in the modern world, it seems to me that it must embrace the ideas behind these words. The works in this section of the website will represent my endeavors to explore new boundaries. 

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