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