The Tao Portfolio

The Calligraphic Society of Arizona of which I am a member, hosted the renowned Mike Gold last weekend for his workshop entitled The Tao Portfolio.  Mike is a very gifted, talented and skilled lettering artist employed by American Greetings for many years.  I was honored to take part in the process of creating my own personal Tao Portfolio.

Taking passages from the Tao te Ching, we created several pieces.  Mike encouraged us to jump out of the calligraphic box many of us are contained within.  This was a formidable challenge.  Trained to create letters with specific criteria-shape, dimension, height, etc. he asks us to break all these rules we learned and treat the alphabet as the artform in itself.  Legibility is not the relevant issue. Here's a lovely banner he created with all those 3" squares created by each one of us attending the workshop.

One of the buzz words of the workshop was "trend" and how art is showing up these days and gaining momentum.  I dunno.  What goes around comes around, right?  I think I'll wait until the reverence of letter forms and their rightly place in the world, returns.
In the meantime, however, I'll jump the bandwagon with others to explore this dimension. Here are some of my Tao pieces created.