I've Met My Match

Sunday and Monday I spent the days with Jennifer, one of my fellow grad students from UofC. She is here for a week with her husband Stephen. Stephen owns a publishing company and is at the London Book Fair until today, so we managed to squeeze in a good two day visit. On Sunday I took her around the East End of London, or at least some of what I know of it. We had a fun day and I got caught up on some of what is happening in Calgary. We had a fabulous buffet curry lunch on Brick Lane and I took her round to my (Barton's) place for tea. Then yesterday I brought her to see the Royal College of Art and then we went to the Victoria and Alberta Museum, which is just down the street. I wanted to see the Cornelia Parker piece which I had missed the first time I was there, and she wanted to see some of the paintings, as she has a love and keen interest in older landscape paintings. Our plan was to just pop in and see those two things and then we could go off somewhere else. We got there at about 11 in the morning, and they kicked us out at 5:30! We were the second to last people to get our coats from the coat check and they turned the lights off to get us out of the gift shop. In all those 6 1/2 hours or so neither of us were bored and although I had been there the first week I was here, I found lots more to look at and we were like addicts who just couldn't tear ourselves away, even though we were overloaded and tired. We did take a short break for lunch and I introduced her to the V&A brownies, which are the best brownies I have ever had in my entire life.
While I was at the V&A I discovered a little room with some calligraphy. Well, you would expect to find calligraphy in a British museum, but this was different, because this wasn't old calligraphy from centuries ago, this was contemporary calligraphy from a work in progress. As I looked around I realized that this project, a new version of the Saint John's Bible, was illustrated and penned by Donald Jackson. Now I don't know if anyone reading this is a calligrapher, but when I was very involved, you could say obsessed, with calligraphy (Bob used to call our house Calligraphy Central), Donald Jackson was one of THE ultimate contemporary calligraphers. He is the calligrapher to Queen Elizabeth, and what was always interesting about him was that he took a very expressionistic approach to his calligraphy and his illustrations. Unusual for a calligrapher, as they are often quite conservative. In the 80's I had studied with a San Francisco calligrapher Thomas Ingmire on many occasions in Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria and California. Thomas was the first American to be admitted into the prestigious Society of Scribes and Illuminators here in London after a rigourous application process and Donald Jackson was one of Thomas' mentors.
As I looked around this little gallery I was thinking to myself how I could see Donald's influence on Thomas, particularly in two broadsides - one a rough and another of the completed pages. I went round the room again and watched the short videos provided. I went round the room again and read all the signs, and that's when I realized that this project of Donald's was huge and that he had a team of artist's, calligrapher's, bookbinders and on and on and on and that Thomas was one of the artist calligraphers and that the two pages that I thought were Donald's but reminded me of Thomas, were actually done by Thomas. I was quite excited to have stumbled onto this beautiful book that reminded me of a kinder and simpler time in my artistic career.
The book project will cost about £2 million by the time it is completed and has been a life long ambition of Donald's. He put forth the idea in 1995 and started on it in 1998. It will be completed in 2007. You can go to the V&A website to read about it. There have just been so many wonderful surprises in London, and this was one of them. You can read more about it at the V&A website at http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/prints_books/saintjohnsbible/
I am happy to find it this year, as the Bow Valley Calligraphy Guild, which I am a founding member of, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
Oh...and by the way I did find the Cornelia Parker piece and I did really love it!