Artist’s Statement
I
remember taking a bus ride as a child; across the aisle
from me a lady sat reading a
letter
written in what I took to be Chinese characters. The
letter itself was a thing of beauty – written on pale
blue tissue-thin airmail stationary that crinkled gently
as she held it in her hands,. Across the delicate blue
page were regular rows of characters rendered in blue
ink, like a wall of tiny drawings across the paper. That
an ordinary letter could be so beautiful, and such
mysterious glyphs intelligible, thrilled and fascinated
me. I went home and held handwritten sheets up to the
light so I could see the writing through the back of the
paper, transformed into unfamiliar abstractions of shape,
line and angle.
Creative wandering has taken me through the study of
typography and design, the practice of calligraphy and
brush lettering, into painting and drawing, learning the
Hebrew alphabet, photography, print making and graphic
design. The scope and variety of the writing systems we
humans have devised over the centuries continue to
stimulate my imagination. I've struggled to put my finger
on just why it is that alphabets and writing systems hold
me so consistently in their sway as abstract visual
systems. And then finally, in 2007, I came upon an online
project by Golan Levin; a
software program that generates abstract alphabets,
called “The Alphabet Synthesis
Machine.” He
explains that illusive “realm of semi-sense” I had
been chasing after all this time:
I
very clearly remember the first time that I encountered
an unfamiliar alphabet: it was an event which occurred in
my family’s synagogue when I was very small, perhaps four
years old. I had just learned to read English, but it had
not yet been explained to me that there could exist other
writing systems apart from the one I knew. One evening
during a ceremony, I asked my father what the funny black
squiggles were in the prayer books we were holding. “Sh!”
he said: “that is how we talk with God.” Astonished, I
became transfixed by the black squiggles, which no longer
seemed quite so funny; but although I stared at them
until I was dizzy, I could find no way to render them
intelligible. Only later did I learn that these marks
were Hebrew. Since that time, I have been preoccupied by
the possibility that abstract forms can connect us to a
reality beyond language, and bridge the thin line between
nonsense and the divine.”
©Golan
Levin, 2002, The Alphabet Synthesis Machine
(http://www.alphabetsynthesis.com and
http://www.flong.com/)
These paintings and prints are meant to evoke that place
between visual abstraction and verbal expression; a
conversation in line, color and image with an illusive
dimension of everyday life.
©2009
Peggy Schutze Shearn