Calligraphy - the art of fine writing - has many aspects. The physical act of writing is dynamic: an ink-loaded brush or pen makes gesture visible. With visibility comes pictorial art, and intellectual meaning as written words communicate ideas. History follows: writing records experience and by-passes time, as only if encoded can the past speak to the future. However, behind all these attributes lies a simple primitive human desire: to make a mark. Ann Hechle

Beginnings

I was born in Calcutta on the last day of 1939 and in 1945 travelled to England with my mother and sister, English nanny and governess in one of the first convoys through the Mediterranean after the war. My father joined us in 1946. The family set up home near Reigate in Surrey.

In due course my sister and I were sent to boarding schools. In the secondary school by great good luck the art department offered various craft options and, aged thirteen, I fell in love with calligraphy. I remember being bewitched by the thick and thin marks made by the square-edged pen as I zig-zagged them across the paper: the marks made were so simple and so direct, and I felt very connected to them - they seemed to flow directly from my fingers. I began to make sheets of really terrible writing and drawings!

After leaving school, still wanting to do calligraphy, I spent a year at the local Reigate School of Art, and then went to the L.C.C. Central School of Arts and Crafts to specialise in calligraphy, though I also went to life drawing, painting and bookbinding classes. One of the calligraphy tutors there was Irene Wellington, who became a very significant person in my life.

Background

Irene was a 2nd generation student of Edward Johnston (1872-1944), the great pioneer figure of the 20th century calligraphic revival. At the start of his career Johnston was much influenced by William Morris; and it was Morris’s secretary Sydney Cockerell who directed Johnston’s attention to various manuscripts in the British Library that provided good letter-forms for him to study. Johnston came to understand that the letter shapes were made directly with an edged pen and it was these understandings and principles that formed the basis of his teaching, (and much of the teaching of following calligraphic generations in England.) So when W.R. Lethaby founded the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1936, he chose Edward Johnston to teach the lettering classes there.

Irene was a very special person, she had great warmth, generosity and integrity. Though she was a follower of Johnston’s teachings, she brought in her own personal quality and approach - and unknowingly changed the whole landscape of what calligraphy might encompass. Hers was a personal approach, and as students we were encouraged to think deeply about our work: the subject matter, the texts we chose, the style of writing, the relative importances, placings and juxtapositions - so that everything was bound together in relationship, orchestrated through one’s own understanding at the time. We struggled! But I think she was tuning us to a way of working that would develop for us throughout our lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Wellington

After leaving art school I lived in London, earning my living as a jobbing calligrapher: writing certificates, invitations, and adding written footnotes to an edition of printed books in the Public Records Office. I also taught lettering two days a week at a local art school in Sutton. I taught pen-made writing; but also drawn Roman Capitals which the students hated - but after all it was the 1960s and they wanted to be artists! And I wasn’t experienced or imaginative enough to be able to make the subject palatable for them. So in 1968 I decided to leave and take a gap year somewhere away from England.

Tepe Yahya: an archeological site in South East Iran.

An Archeological interlude

What to do? I wanted to find something interesting: the Middle East? the countryside, not a city. I didn’t need to be paid, but I needed to be kept by joining a team. A friend came up with the name of an archeologist who was returning to an excavation in North Iraq. I met him in a restaurant in Kensington for lunch, and was invited to join him and his team at the British Institute of Archeology in Baghdad in a few days time. I did.

And that was the beginning of one of the most interesting years of my life.

In Iraq, after collecting the appropriate government papers, the team drove up north from Baghdad. The site was situated near Tel Afar about 40 miles NW of Mosul, in a vast plain which stretched out just south of the Taurus mountain of Turkey which hovered in the distance to the north. The site was a 2nd millennium B.C. stone built city. It was winter. It rained. But I was introduced to archaeology, and learnt the conventions in drawing the artefacts, (it was helpful too in knowing that, in this context, I could always earn my keep.) In the fields alongside the site tribal Iraqi families were living in black tents, and although we had no means of verbal communication I was often invited to take tea with them. They were kind and generous. After about three months, the site closed for that season, and we returned to Baghdad and from there I was given a lift to Tehran where I waited in the British Institute of Archaeology for another expedition to come through.

The one that came was an American team funded by Harvard. They were returning for a second summer to a very large and important site called Tepe Yahya in the south-east of Iran in the Sogoun valley.The director of the expedition warmly invited me to join their team of 11 people - his wife, colleagues and students - for the season. I waited till they were ready and then joined them. It took 36 hours in a bus from Tehran round the desert to the town nearest the site, and 4 hours from there in a landrover to the site itself.) The mound was huge, the time-span ran from about 4,000 BC; and we were digging up remarkable artefacts : painted pottery, steatite objects, stamp-seals. Working there was the most exciting and wonderful experience, I returned for four more summers. In the expedition’s 4th and final year we dug up some proto-Elamite tablets with primitive written marks : some of the earliest known writing. To dig up something of such significance with your own hands is a very rare and privileged experience. I loved being there: the silence, the simplicity of the day; we worked hard, we talked, argued, joked and complained about the food - and slept outside underneath the stars.

My last expedition, and on my way home that year, was in Turkey - near Karaman in the Anatolian plateau.The site was dated about 7,000 B.C., and we were looking for evidence of domesticated wheat and cattle. I don’t remember very much of this time except the colours of the wide Anatolian landscapes in late August: blond with harvesting, and blue skies above.

The Craft Renaissance of the 1970s

In 1971 the Crafts Advisory Committee (later called the Crafts Council) was set up, led by the inspirational figure of Victor Margrie, who was himself a ceramicist. The aim of the organisation was to support makers, and ‘advance and encourage the creation of works of fine craftsmanship’. The Minister for the Arts, Lord Eccles, championed the crafts, and so with government funding Victor carried out an intensive programme with vision: choosing his team with care and giving them much responsibility. In 1973 there was a major exhibition at the V&A called ‘The Craftsman’s Art’, and Craft Magazine was set up in the same year.

Regional visits were programmed: for craftsmen to go to different communities and demonstrate their working practice. So, for example, four craftsmen - perhaps an embroiderer, a jeweller, a potter, a weaver - (taking all their kit with them) would visit schools, a care home, a prison, a library, a town hall. I took part in some of these ventures, and indeed they were extremely successful. As was the V&A craftsmen’s demonstrations week called ‘The Makers’, where 14 craftsmen each sitting in their appropriate area, talked and demonstrated their craft. I remember sitting outside the Library, surrounded by spectators with a child on each knee. The Crafts were riding high.

Getting back to work

Being engaged in these educational craft activities meant that I was inevitably in contact with a wide range of people and organisations; so over the next decade or so I responded to invitations to undertake various commissions, and to participate in seminars and workshops in the U.K. and abroad. I also made time to pursue my own work.

Trials

One of the ideas I had in mind would require a large broadsheet, which would be filled with writings and drawings. I thought it would be rather like an opera where different voices each with their own identity and stories to tell, would all interweave to create a single multi-faceted experience. I failed miserably! Although I had sketched out the rough draft in 4 days I lacked the technical skill to take it further. I didn’t take it up again for 7 years.

Musings

To put three elements together is easy. To put fifty together is exponentially more difficult, especially as words have intellectual meaning. All the items need to be taken into account: the story, the levels of importance, the grouping of illustrations, the placement, the eye-track of different texts sustained and the focus of what it is about. All these need to play together in harmony. Later, these things become intuitive; but as has been said: ’Some things can never be taught, only arrived at’.

I did, however, learn some important things. One was to keep the design in the ‘jelly’ stage as long as possible, so that the whole piece grows and remains as one, rather than as separate pieces tacked together. The other was to enlarge one’s vocabulary. Problems can be resolved in a variety of ways: for instance, if an emphasis is needed, a mark can be larger, denser, in colour, re-placed or isolated. Options give greater freedom.

Irene Wellington often used to say: ’Clarify your intentions’. But sometimes as you work the goal posts change: deeper understandings show themselves and need to be embraced, and thus the focus is shifted. This is really difficult: new insights cannot just be tacked on, so from the beginning the work needs to be accepted as a living thing. And perhaps to assemble significant threads into relationship reflects the deeper endeavour?

Questions also arose: what is a ‘good’ letter-form, assessed by what criteria? Are there underlying laws of harmony: in art, in music that we can use or break? If so, what are they and where would we find them? These questions lay dormant; but much later on they re-surfaced and were partly addressed by studying the laws of nature and mathematical necessities - the major subject matter of this book, Figures of Speech.

The Image of Grace 90 x 59cm, 1992. From 'The Image of Grace, an Exploration of Hexagram No 22 in the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes', Ann Hechle, pub 2020.