The art of Ian K.

by Mel Strohminger

Mel Strohminger: What inspired you to focus on calligraphy among your many pursuits?  
Ian K: Well, my road to becoming a polymath is defined, by and large, by a difficulty that I have with focus. People have told me my whole life that I need to focus and I tried, I really tried, but it never worked out for me. I suppose that I’ve made up for it by learning how I learn and getting better at learning, at self-awareness. It’s important because I never know how long I’ll care about something before I lose interest. As for calligraphy, I have always cared about my handwriting, and I even won some penmanship awards in grade school. I always liked the way certain letters looked and would wonder how they could be made with a pen since my pens as a child were all mono-line pens. That is, they had no variety in the thickness or thinness [of the lines] based on pressure or direction. So, I would try and draw the shaded letters, but since the letters of the blackletter script [also known as Gothic script] or the uncial script aren’t meant to be written with a mono-line pen, my efforts were met with failure, and I moved on to other things.
    Though I’d ceased trying to do calligraphy, I never stopped caring about my penmanship or enjoying the physical act of writing. As a youngster, I would buy a neat-looking journal or a fine-point pen and just wrack my brain for things to write. Just because I could. My mother did try and stoke my interest in calligraphy, but she only showed me Spencerian and Edwardian scripts or hands based on those scripts. And for whatever reason, those never grabbed me and I never connected them with broad-pen calligraphy. In college, I met and befriended a pen salesman from the Quill pen company who introduced me to fountain pens. He gave me my first fountain pen, a demi Moore (a joke that never gets old) with a very flexible nib. My college notes are almost entirely written with that pen, though, and I learned to handle a flexible nib and learned the great flair a flexible nib can give your writing once you learn how to handle it. He then introduced me to Susan Wirth, who invited me to work with her at some of the vintage pen shows. At the New York City pen show in 2003, I met Ward Dunham, who introduced me to the italic, or chisel-edged, pen and broad pen calligraphy.
 I think I’ve stuck with calligraphy because it’s very meditative. It’s simple without being easy, and so many of the other things I do are much less concrete. I can’t sit down and practice being entertaining, for example, but I can sit down and fill my mind with nothing but vertical lines, horizontal lines, crescents, diagonal lines, and know that, hey, these are what make letters.

MS: What styles of calligraphy have you mastered and which styles do you prefer?
IK: I don’t think I’ve mastered any style of calligraphy, but I’m most comfortable with uncial, Roman, and blackletter hands. As a craftsman, I find myself drawn to and impressed by the power of simplicity. There’s a story about the Pope requesting Leonardo da Vinci to submit some of his work for a competition for a new commission. Leonardo kept putting him off saying he was too busy, as the requests grew more and more insistent. In the end, to avoid the Pope having him arrested, he drew, freehand and at arm’s length, a perfect circle on a sheet of paper and sent it to the Pope, who promptly gave him the commission. To draw a perfect circle, freehand and unsupported, is one of the hardest things possible. It has been achieved by few artists and usually only after much practice, and it was for a long time considered to be the pinnacle of artistic achievement. I’m drawn to things like that. Simple, no frills. Foundational hand, blackletter, Roman, uncial.

MS: Which pen(s) do you use for calligraphy? 
IK: I have a leather roll-up pen case I bought from Pendemonium two years ago. It holds five pens, and they are always with me. In order of size, I have an Osmiroid B4, a Parker 75 with a US98 nib, a fine Sheaffer No-Nonsense, and two Parker Sonnets with hand-ground nibs—all italic nibs. I have other pens, but those are the five I always have with me.