The calligrapher arranges her text spatially, just as a composer or songwriter arranges her text temporally. In the Saint John’s Bible, Sally Mae Joseph offers a gilded treatment of Psalm 150, a psalm itself packed with instrumental imagery. Jackson describes his art as “painting with words.” I add that calligraphy is music on the page. Several works from living artists suggest possibilities. How, I now wonder, does calligraphy mean? What aesthetic senses, what theological affordances does it carry, for both Christians and Jews? But as I began to practice calligraphy-what better way to train the eye than by training the hand?-I came to appreciate calligraphy as more than mere pretty letters. Like many viewers, at first I was most entranced by its artwork, visual meditations on beloved passages of scripture. I have shown, taught, and gazed at this Bible for five years. This unique project, finished in 2011 and billed as “America ’ s Book of Kells ,” is the first handwritten, hand-illustrated Catholic Bible of its scale and quality since the time of Gutenberg. Jackson is famous for the Saint John’s Bible, an illuminated manuscript of the Catholic Bible he created in concert with a team of artists and the Benedictine monks of Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota. Those viewing his work, Jackson attests, can trace his body and breath in his lines. The energy, skill, muscle memory, and focus which Serena Williams drives into her arm’s wide sweep of the tennis racket-all of that is distilled into the small strokes of the hand scribing beautiful letters. CALLIGRAPHY, NOTES BRITISH MASTER SCRIBE Donald Jackson, requires the whole body.
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