The importance of words

I’m daily amazed by the quantity of words around us. Just stop to look, one day, and you’ll see them everywhere. Often, the words we see aren’t helpful to us, but are invasive. Even many of the words that we choose to display in our homes are cheap, mass-produced stock phrases.

The words we use have tremendous power. Through our choice of language we have the ability to give love and to rescind it, to change people’s environments for the better and for the worse, and to influence people in infinite directions. The words we choose to display around us, then, are crucial. They should be potently part of us… not a ‘live, love laugh’ stock phrase, but something that we live and breathe, something that evokes memory and reminds us of the best we can be, the most loved we can be.

The most beautiful aspect of my work is that I get to be a part of my customers’ journeys. Rarely do I have the same request twice and, even then, I write it slightly differently. Everything is unique. My customers choose precisely the words that they would like to convey. When I write a piece that someone is going to cherish in their own home, I am conscious that every pen stroke demands my fullest attention. After all, the calligraphy is going to be displayed for years, decades, perhaps generations to come. Sometimes, this takes longer than I expected. I have to prepare, think, plan, rethink, re-plan, before the final version emerges.

Ultimately, though, the words that I write should take on a new life. That is what I do as a calligrapher: I re-present text. I take a text that a customer wants and I present it afresh. And, by so doing, I hopefully invite the reader to read it in a new way. This is the great beauty of commissioning a piece of calligraphy.

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A quote by Gandhi in deep purple text.