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A woman of letters Myrna Rosen brings the ancient art of calligraphy to a new generation Wednesday, March 10, 1999 By Kelly D. Burgess, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
As her students gather around, craning their necks to see, Myrna Rosen scratches on a huge roll of butcher paper with a pen made from a tongue depressor and dental picks.
But Rosen's not a dentist, not even close. She's a calligrapher, one of the best in the world. As she does once every semester at Carnegie Mellon University, she's taking up primitive writing utensils to give her students a sense of the vast history of their art.
She begins at the beginning, with the blocky, awkward Roman letters that can still be found carved into ancient buildings in Europe. As she runs through the evolution of letters, she writes each "hand," which is what a style of lettering is called, as it was written in the first century or 15th or just 200 years ago. She never changes her tools and never makes a mistake. It's an amazing presentation spanning 2,000 years in less than 30 minutes.
Alison Scudiere has been in Rosen's class for four semesters and said this ritual presentation on the history of letters is still the highlight of the course for her. Scudiere, 21, of Morgantown, W.Va., is majoring in communications design.
"Learning calligraphy is important for my future because it helps me to understand how letters relate to each other, and that really is the basis of all design," she said.
Suguru Ishizaki of Mt. Lebanon takes the class for a similar reason. A faculty member in CMU's design department, he teaches computer-oriented design at the graduate level. He was doing a research project on moving typography when he realized that he needed to go back to the original discipline before he could recreate it for advanced technological applications.
"Although I teach computer graphics and lettering, I never had to actually make the letters myself," said Ishizaki. "Unless you understand this with your hands, there is no way to fully comprehend the nature of text and text-based expression."
Rosen laughs at the idea of ever fully understanding the potential of the written word. She said she is always learning and has forgotten so much she learned in her early days that it's almost like it's new when she rediscovers something.
She's one of the founders of The Calligraphy Guild of Pittsburgh, which is sponsoring a retrospective exhibition next month to celebrate its anniversary, "Twenty Years of Written Art." The exhibit, which will feature some of Rosen's work, will run April 1-30 at the Greensburg Garden and Civic Center.
Everything Rosen has learned, she tries to pass on to her own students. It's her tribute to her mentor, the legendary calligrapher Arnold Bank, who taught her everything he knew. When they met in 1974, he was an internationally known letter designer and teacher and she was a stay-at-home mom. He was gruff, impatient and curt. She is patient, warm, and welcoming. In spite of their opposite personalities, she soon became his protege, and, eventually, his third hand. He died in 1986, but Rosen refers to him constantly, and it's clear that she still considers him her inspiration.
"Arnold Bank is credited with sparking the calligraphy movement in America, and he did that by exciting us about letters," said Rosen. "He was known to us as the guardian of the alphabet, and he could become a lion if you did something wrong. But he also had a gift for recognizing the strengths of his students and working with those strengths."
Rosen had been studying calligraphy for five years before she mustered up enough courage to take one of Bank's courses. His reputation scared her, and her experience on her first day of class didn't do much to alleviate her fears. Her first class assignment was to write a short biography telling her teacher something about herself.
"Arnold picked up my paper, read it, and said dismissively, 'Mother of three children'? Well, do the best you can'," Rosen recalled. "Three weeks later, he said it was too bad I started so late."
It wasn't long before Rosen's exceptional talent led Bank to make her his assistant and apprentice. She didn't drive, so every Saturday her husband, Jack, would drop her off at the university. Rosen would spend the morning in class and the afternoon in the library doing research for Bank. Between her apprenticeship and her research, she was gathering a prodigious knowledge of calligraphy that she wanted to share.
In addition to her classes at CMU, which have a long waiting list, she also teaches at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, gives numerous workshops around the country, and has been active in the international calligraphic community since 1980, when the first International Lettering Arts Conference was held in Minneapolis. She is one of only six people in the world who has been to every international conference since that first one, and she has taught at five of them. This year's conference in Connecticut will make it six.
Calligraphy wasn't always this accessible to the average person. In past centuries, it was the province of a handful of professional scribes, a few learned men who often labored for years to produce beautifully wrought books and manuscripts for the limited number of people who could actually read them. But the practice of calligraphy began to die out as handwriting became more utilitarian and mechanical methods of printing evolved.
Then, in mid-19th century England, the Arts and Crafts movement was founded by artist William Morris. Interested in the application of art to everyday life, he rediscovered the use of the flat-edged pen and the visual beauty of the written word.
The movement continued to grow, and now beautifully illustrated poems, books and phrases are a common sight in gallery shows and arts and crafts displays. Rosen delights in calligraphy's "new" status as an art form.
"Having survived the advent of the printing press, the typewriter, and now the computer, calligraphy is finding a place in the world of fine art," said Rosen. "To quote my friend Donald Jackson, scribe to the Queen of England, 'Calligraphy has come off the book shelf and gone up onto the walls.' "
Rosen and Jackson are two of the reasons that calligraphy is now considered an art form rather than just a form of communication. And thanks to Rosen's indefatigable enthusiasm, Pittsburgh's calligraphic community has been in the forefront of this renaissance for more than 20 years.
In 1977 a classmate of Rosen's, Jim Moran, returned from a calligraphy workshop in New York fired up about a new idea.
"Jim came home from this seminar and told Arnold that they had a wonderful calligraphy club in New York that was very active in teaching and promoting the art and asked if we could start one here," said Rosen. "Arnold was scornful. He said this is not New York City, and a group like that would never work in Pittsburgh."
In spite of Bank's pessimistic dismissal, Moran and Rosen pursued the idea. This year, the Pittsburgh Calligraphy Guild is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The group's monthly meetings still focus on traditional scribal activities, and Rosen often is the one who teaches the workshop.
In March, she's doing a workshop on italic, and in May she'll be demonstrating a Gothic cursive hand called Secretary. It's the hand, she says, that William Shakespeare used, proving that beautiful writing is an art in more ways than one.
The Calligraphy Guild of Pittsburgh's retrospective exhibition, "Twenty Years of Written Art," runs from April 1 to 30 at the Greensburg Garden and Civic Center, Old Salem Road. Hours for the free show are 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays. For details, call (724)836-1123. For more information about the Calligraphy Guild of Pittsburgh, call 412-856-2882 or visit its Web site at http://trfn.clpgh.org/cgp/index.shtml/
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