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Calligraphy and poetry in collaboration

8/25/2016

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Works in preparation for 2018 exhibition 
at the Jewel Gallery, San Francisco Public Library
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Ars Poetica:
Empsonics including a remark by George Saintsbury

I can’t remember who predicted the fancy damage.
Seeing where a noise is coming from
helps. It helps the ‘cry’ in lyric when it is well managed.


​Epic isn’t for you if you don’t like carnage.
An English fountain won’t play after 5pm
even though you’ve bought your ticket. Fancy damage


to a country house and call it Carthage:
​a fountain though a pen when a swan but the museum

turns musician as the night wears on. Carnage

is a joy in an epic and the fanciest damage.
Seeing noises will show you where an owl is coming from.

It helps the ‘cry’ in lyric when it is well managed.

Alan Halsey

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Calligraphy and Poetry in Collaboration

8/8/2016

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Works in preparation for 2018 exhibition 
at the Jewel Gallery, San Francisco Public Library

LUTE POEM, BY ROBERT BRINGHURST
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      LUTE POEM
      The first manoeuvre to master in tuning
      the lute is to want without wanting:
      to wish without wishing, to fish
      and the hunt without fishing and hunting:
      to burst through the door, asking
      for everything, yes, and for nothing:
      to learn how to hope, not to hope for;

     to open the door neither inward
     nor outward: unlatch and unhinge
     and unglue and unmortise
     the door, returning the wood
     to the tree where it grew
     and the lock and the key to the barstock,
     the ingot, the slurry, the ore;

     and to take out the windows and pull
     down the walls and replace them
     with doorways and doorways and doorways,
     the jambs short and tall, the lintels
     and sills of different proportions -
     some wider, like octaves and fifths,
     and some slimmer, like seconds and thirds.
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New Year's resolution, 2016

4/14/2016

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Cafe Chronicles,  January, 2016
Calligraphy and Drawings by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, CA,  2013
Unique Book
5.5 x 7.5 inches,  29  pages

The January 2016 Chronicle presents my New Year's resolution, the word "attentive."  It represents my desire to be more attentive to my actions and activities in life. Each day of the book features the Kanji character for the word and on some pages also the word in English. Doing this ties with the Japanese event called Kakizome.  It is an event where the first calligraphy of the year is written out and this happens on the 2nd of January. In Japan people usually write their New Year's resolution, or a character that makes them feel happy, such as dream or hope.

Being "attentive" is more of a desire for me....trying to achieve it will probably be more of a task than an expression of happiness! The pages combine the character and words with ink brush marks and the daily drawings of people in Cafe Puccini.

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Thomas Ingmire: at the Sonoma Valley Art Museum, March 19, 2016 to June 12, 2016

3/26/2016

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PROGRAMS AND EVENTS
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Workshop: Calligraphy and Text: exploring the wider spectrum: April 9 and 10, 2016

1/8/2016

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Thomas Ingmire in collaboration with Anglo-Welsh poet, David Annwn
From January 25 to April 24 the collaborative works of Thomas Ingmire and David Annwn will be on display at the Book Club of California.  This workshop is a unique opportunity to gain insights about the works and to explore the processes that Ingmire and Annwn have discovered during their more than ten years of collaboration.  The program will blend the processes of creating a text with ideas on the development of new innovative visual interpretations of the text. This will not be a “writing workshop” per se, but students will be led through a series of gentle exercises that enable them to play with or “own” their words.  From this point the focus will be on the visual shaping of words and interpretative calligraphic approaches.  The exercises will embrace the affinities between poetry, calligraphy, and music. The study will also review the work of Hans-Joachim Burgert, the East German artist/calligrapher  whose  seminal theories on the development of writing have had a critical influence on modern visual interpretations of the word. Issues relating to how visual form influences meaning will explored.

Open to students having experience with mark making and calligraphic tools.  Formal calligraphic training will be helpful, but not an absolute requirement. An open mind and some form of visual graphic or art training would be an nice substitute.


The workshop will be sponsored by The Friends of Calligraphy and held at the Albany, CA Senior Center. If you are interested in the program, please follow the link below.

workshop
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Mary Shelley’s Elisions

11/25/2015

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Mary Shelley’s Elisions
Poetry by David Annwn
Calligraphy and Drawing, Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, CA  2015
A Unique book 
15” x 11”,   32 pages

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As a  tribute to next year’s Bicentennial Celebration of Mary Shelley’s creativity and her famous sojourn at the Villa Diodati, David Annwn has written a three part poem titled Diodati Dance Card. Mary Shelley’s Elisions, a poem from the sequence, is David’s creative response to Mary’s handwritten MS of Frankenstein. David senses in the excisions and elisions of Shelley’s handwriting, the conflicting emotion behind her words. He asks, “is the making of a striking revolutionary novel like the recombination of old memories (the re-vivication of dead hopes and fears)? Does Mary bring old dreams to life -some menacing and unwelcome. 

​As a calligraphic work, Annwn’s poem has invited an exploration between the recreation of Shelley’s handwriting and a visually expressive interpretation of the story she has written. The calligraphy and the poetry also draw upon music, in this case the work Mozart’s Don Giovanni,’ particularly the‘Final Commendatore Scene.  David had written that Mary and her husband loved Mozart's music and particularly this final scene.
For more images
For Discussion by David Annwn

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A Zorn Variation

10/20/2015

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This book is  a variation from the original "A Zorn Suite" described in the
August 25 entry. In this book I have created  calligraphic visual responses
to the Zorn compositions and have used them as guides to the development
​ of the writing forms and page layouts.  Selected images and.calligraphic
responses are shown below.


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Response to "Kiss Me" John Zorn's Shir Hashirim
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Calligraphic response to "Kiss Me" poem by David Annwn
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Response to John Zorn's ‘Haiti’ from Filmworks X: In the Mirror of Maya Deren
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Calligraphic interpretation of "Haiti" poem by David Annwn
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Response to Zorn's ‘Apocryphon’ from Transmigration of the Magus
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Calligraphic interpretation of "Apocryphon" poem by David Annwn
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the zorn suite

8/25/2015

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The three poems by David Annwn drew inspiration from musical 
compositions by the celebrated musician, John Zorn. “Kiss me,"
 is from Zorn’s album, Shir Hashirim; “Haiti,” is from FilmWorks X: 
In the Mirror of Maya Deren; and “Apocryphon” is from Transmigration 
of the Magus.  The abstract imagery in the book and the visual 
depiction of the words attempt to capture both the sense of the 
poetry and rhythms and tone of the music, the mood moving from 
first encounter, to an enchanted turbulence and, thirdly, an 
evocation of the hidden forces sustaining life.
for more images
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THUNDERCLAPS

7/28/2015

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THUNDERCLAPS : A Visual/Verbal Storm 
Calligraphy and Drawing by Thomas Ingmire
Text selections from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
San Francisco, CA, 2014
Unique Book
12” x 13.5”,  24 pages Including cover, 
 Acrylic on Mylar with gold leaf illumination

THUNDERCLAPS in FINNEGANS WAKE are invented words that are 100 letters long. Joyce included ten; the final one was actually made up of 101 letters.  These “words,” which are wonderful to read out loud, interplay with abstract calligraphic marks created in response to selections of music and readings that are part of the Wayword and Wordsigns project.  

The drawings in the book were inspired by creatures depicted in the Book of Kells. Aside from the Irish connection with Joyce and his reference to the book, Kells reminds us of the magic of the written word to stand merely as a visual image. Like the Book of Kells, the book invites the viewer to experience its visual splendor, and in reading, to the “hear” the music of the language.  


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A Pulse Walks in... Hint we know more    or can, or will    than we know

5/29/2015

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This was a collaboration with David Annwn, an Anglo-Welsh poet whom I have worked with on a number of occasions. Most of the past projects have involved  a series of innovative inter-medial responses to each other's work.  Usually these procedures featured one of us making an initial contribution and the other responding to this in turn in a successive sequence. In February 2015 we mutually agreed to follow a new method where I started the process with a few initial marks, to which David wrote lines of poetry on a different page.  I  then returned returned to my initial page with a  further drawing  response. This back and forth process  was repeated eight times, resulting in one final drawing and a poem. Each stage of the process has been recorded and assembled in a small booklet which is a unique record of its own creation. The stages of the project follow below. Beginning June 1, successive stages will be added daily.
 
S T A G E  O N E
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         a pulse walks in
         slowly unfolding
 
         a torsion, a branch
 
          whirl open
          shimmer

S T A G E  T W O 
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             a scatter tracK
             leaps into scintilla

              and minutiae
              glitter
              in surface calm


S T A G E  T H R E E
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             co-ordinates
             emerging  say
   
             a known street corner
              intersect, a
              hazard purchase

              on memory
              where air or water

              working through
              at intervals


              is given way
                                                                                                                                                      




                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

S T A G E  F O U R
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      hail-stones ricochet
      off steps
      of the words

    downpour and thrash
    off where we

    must climb
    past the sleeping
    wisp of bush -
                                                                                                                                                      
    almost missed –
    which out-waits weather                                                                                                                                                          
    waits to flourish
                                                                                                                                                             




                                                                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                                 
                                                                                                                                                               

S T A G E  F I V E
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 sudden


 phrases flung outwards
  half-formed
  and blurred

 hidden coherences
  keyboards
  vocabularies,                                                                                                              


sensed –unheard -frequencies
 as when the orders
hemming speech
                                                                                         hint we know more
 or can, or will
 than we know       

S T A G E   S I X
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       lexes instilled
       with cyclonic variegates

        the scape shudders
        with flashes and

        sails, their foundries
        circumvent

         the speakers,
         verbal yields

          to the struck 
          conductor, an eddy
          gales in after-images

S T A G E  S E V E N

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a scattergram
the upheld ciphers
opening over

masses, cities
lit air, pollution

clearing in
windshields
the data and radial

breezes cooling
from high atmosphere
freshening out



                                                                                                                                                               

                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                              



S T A G E  E I G H T

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as fragments
disperse

aerated
gold
rushes in 
spirals
through



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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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