Monday, July 28, 2008

Gestural Writing with Yves Leterme at conference

My class at conference was gestural writing with Yves Leterme. He was an excellent teacher, patiently taking us through exercises to help us deconstruct the letterforms and then reconstruct them in a thoughtful but spontaneous-looking way. He was self-effacing, honest and generous with his demonstrations. He also is an amazing communicator, considering that English is his second language. It was lovely to lieten to his lilting accent!

We did pages and pages of practice work! Then around the middle of the 2nd day we started to do some things on individual sheets, like this repetition exercise, when we were allowed to add color! Everything that we did during the week was a progression, building in succession on what he had taught before. It was challenging to remember it all and implement in into new exercises as the week went on. Here are some samples:

Joan Machinchick's "artifex" exercise with color added:

Yves' "artifex" demo:

Another demo by Yves:


Two Japanese women were in our class and they were like stealth calligraphers! They just sat quietly and knocked out some amazing work! Here are a few pieces by Hiroko Shimizu that just blew us all away:




This is another example of the repetition exercise, done by Barbara Beattie:


Another repetition exercise by Yukimi Annand:

3 comments:

Kelly said...

this work is stunning! i love your blog and all the examples of beautiful work that you show. thanks! i would love to learn this technique.

Alice Young said...

Thanks for posting these photos, Roann! I hope to take classes with Yves Leterme one day - till then I'll just have to read other people's blogs... which is a treat, too!

Anonymous said...

Hello. And Bye.