Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Calligrapher in an electronic world

Artist pursues her passion, craft with the pen

Cathy Ledeker says there’s no substitute for the human touch in today’s technological world. That’s why she continues to create designs and inscriptions using her calligrapher’s pens.

By Matt Erickson (Contact)

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

Cathy Ledeker grasps the skinny, wooden pen, dips its metal tip, or “nib,” into a small jar of black ink, and leans over a thick, wooden-covered Bible.

Ink flows out of the gap between the nib’s two points as she inscribes the name of the book’s future owner.

Her pen moves smoothly but carefully — she can’t just throw the expensive Bible away if she makes a mistake.

She pushes down to give the middle slant of an uppercase “S” a wide, snakelike body, and lifts up to leave a light, airy curl on the tail of a lowercase “j.” The phone rings, and she sets the pen down to answer.

She hears a man’s gruff East Coast accent on the other end, asking her to paint a sign for his Kansas City strip club, complete with naked female silhouettes. Ledeker accepts. Though she practices an ancient art form, she sees no problem stepping away from inscriptions in holy books to sketch shapely female forms.

When you’re a professional calligrapher in an increasingly electronic world, you take whatever work you can get.

More than 500 years after Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press supplanted pens as the dominant mode of mass communication and at a time when computers threaten to replace printed words with electronic ones, Ledeker is one of a few who still make a living inscribing letters by hand.

The only calligrapher listed in Lawrence’s Yellow Pages, Ledeker supported herself and two daughters for 25 years through calligraphy and related arts.

Combining the written word with an artistic freedom machines can’t match, Ledeker believes the human hand still has a place in an electronic world.

“It’s sort of like eating fast food as opposed to a gourmet meal,” Ledeker said. “You can live on it, but how do you compare fast food with something really made with fine ingredients and love, and beautifully presented?”

Ink from Ledeker’s pen has reached across the United States, into the hands of Jerry Falwell, the evangelical pastor, and Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist.

Ledeker taught herself the technique of calligraphy after discovering it during college, and she turned it into a career when people she knew started asking her to do projects for them.

Now she works full-time teaching art classes at Van Go Mobile Arts in Lawrence, but she still has time for calligraphy on weekends.

For Ledeker, calligraphy is alive but eternal.

“There’s the definition, which is the art of beautiful writing,” she said. “But then I have this quote on my desk at work that says, ‘Calligraphy must dance.’”

To make it dance, Ledeker also uses illumination — illustrations interwoven with letters of the alphabet, sometimes adorned with thin sheets of gold leaf.

Ledeker specializes in combining calligraphy, illumination and painting to create a fusion of artistic styles.

“I don’t think they have a word for me,” she said.

Ledeker worked with Mike Sull, a Gardner calligrapher, to create a mural at the Kansas City Public Library’s downtown branch in 2004. Sull said Ledeker’s marriage of styles separated her from other calligraphers.

“In terms of what she does, primarily with illumination and painting, she’s one of the best in the country,” he said.

Her craft

When Ledeker begins a project, she starts by sketching it in pencil. Starting with ink would make her too nervous.

“I’m not a very good speller, so I have to double-check everything very carefully before I ink it in,” she said.

She draws widely spaced horizontal lines to guide her lettering, much like the paper a third-grader might use to practice cursive handwriting.

Then, she letters in the words, slowly and deliberately, filling in the lines with simple letters, slanted at the same angle, with straight edges and perfectly rounded curves. This is the practical, nuts-and-bolts part of calligraphy. The free-flowing, artistic part comes later.

All calligraphers must learn to juggle the function and the art of their craft, she said.

“For a student trying to learn this, it’s just like juggling four baseballs and jumping on a trampoline,” she said. “It’s like learning to write all over again.”

Now that she has the basics covered, it’s time for the fun part.

Ledeker dips the pen into the ink — she uses only dip pens, never fountain pens — and goes to work. Gone are the deliberate strokes of before; now she lets loose, working fast and free, her pen’s motion as flowing and graceful as the letters that result.

She presses and lifts her pen in a wavelike motion, spreading and narrowing the two tips of the nib to vary the widths of her lines. She adds touches that give the letters their character — strong bodies, wispy tails and curling serifs.

She makes sure not to get too carried away, so her letters remain legible.

“You have to be careful,” she said. “It’s like wearing too much jewelry.”

But Ledeker prefers to give her letters more personality than other, more consistent, calligraphers.

“I just have too much bubbling out, I guess,” she said.

Her work

Ledeker’s clients over the years have ranged from famous national figures to local characters, and from huge corporations to world-renowned museums to KU departments and schools.

Her concurrent jobs with the strip club and the Bible publisher made for an interesting scene at home. She would paint fishnet stockings and high heels on a 15-by-5-foot sign stretched between two poles in the hallway, while Bibles were piled high on the kitchen table and her daughters played nearby.

“They thought nothing of it — just, ‘Oh, Mom’s painting something,’” she said.

Among the names Ledeker inscribed in the Bibles was that of Jerry Falwell, the politically active evangelical preacher. Ledeker admitted she was less than thrilled to think of her work falling into Falwell’s hands.

“I thought, ‘Oh my, the life of an artist for hire,’” Ledeker said.

During the 1990s, she made an award certificate for Stephen Jay Gould, the scientist and strong advocate of the theory of evolution.

The award, from an association of biological specimen collectors, honored Gould for his biological research.

When Ledeker makes a certificate, she doesn’t just write the name of the award on some nice paper — a computer could do that.

She integrates drawings and art into the text, using images related to the person’s accomplishments.

For Gould, she created a border out of a series of evolving wildlife images around the outside of the paper.

Gould was so impressed by its beauty that he wrote to her.

“I got this wonderful letter,” she said. “He told me that he’d never hung anything on his office wall before, but he made an exception and hung that.”

Ledeker has produced similar certificates for directors at the Smithsonian Institute, the New York Museum of Natural History and the Royal Botanical Gardens in England. She also created a certificate as Robert Eaton, a KU graduate, former CEO of the Chrysler Corporation and namesake of Eaton Hall.

Her impact

The mark of Ledeker’s hand can be found all over Lawrence as well — in the hallways of campus buildings, in the homes and offices of influential citizens and in the lives of disadvantaged youths.

Anyone who walks into the main entrances of JRP and Green Halls can see some of Ledeker’s work hanging nearby.

She painted the ornamental borders and lettered the Gothic script on the “dean’s club” signs for the schools of education and law. She made a similar border for the school of business that hangs in the dean’s office at Summerfield Hall.

All of the borders contain a motif of swirling, spiraling flowers — something Ledeker has also used in the work she has done for the Kansas University Endowment Association. Ledeker’s illustrations — including mesmerizing images of flowers weaving in and out of each other and light, dreamy watercolor paintings of monarch butterflies and sunflowers — have established design motifs for entire publications.

She has also produced bright and colorful scenes involving Jayhawks and campus sights for the mailers the association has sent to potential donors.

“I’ve done all variety of Jayhawks,” Ledeker said.

Kirsten Bosnak, senior editor for the endowment association, said Ledeker combines signature touches, like the swirling flowers, with a versatility that makes her useful.

“If you want an impressionistic watercolor, she can do that,” Bosnak said. “If you want something that’s a copy of something else, she can do that. If you want something whimsical, she can do that.”

Tom Groene can also attest to Ledeker’s abilities. Groene won this year’s Citizen of the Year award from the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce, which Ledeker letters and illustrates each year.

Groene said he would have hung Ledeker’s certificate on his wall at home even if it didn’t list all of his accomplishments, just so he could admire its color and beauty. The certificate, about two feet by three feet, features shades of brown, blue, red and gold.

Ledeker currently shares her artistic talents with some of Lawrence’s most needy, younger people as the art director for Van Go Mobile Arts, 715 New Jersey St.

Van Go, a nonprofit agency, hires 14- to 21-year-olds — selected based on low family income, mental illness or problems at school — to create artwork that is sold or commissioned. Ledeker teaches them art skills.

Lynne Green, Van Go executive director, said Ledeker was vital to Van Go’s operation.

“It’s what you would hope any wonderful teacher would have: sort of the combination of high expectations and, yet, a very loving way,” Green said.

Her tradition

Even in everyday life, Ledeker writes everything by hand — she never types.

“There’s something of the person in it that is missing when you don’t actually write it,” she said. “A signature is like a portrait of a person, and you may sign your name differently depending on what kind of a mood you’re in, or what kind of day you’ve had, or how much of a hurry you’re in.”

Ledeker and other calligraphers bemoan the decline of penmanship — the art of handwriting — in American society as typing replaces handwriting in many areas of life.

Penmanship was once a necessary and marketable business skill, said Joe Vitolo, a scholar and historian of penmanship who is also a professor at Marquette University’s school of dentistry.

Recordkeeping and accounting were all done by hand, and as recently as the first half of the 20th century, entire colleges of penmanship trained students for careers in handwriting, he said.

But the spread of the typewriter in the early 20th century sounded the death knells for penmanship as a skill, Vitolo said.

“Our school systems no longer teach handwriting to a large degree,” he said. “It’s considered almost superfluous now.”

Ledeker owns a computer, but it sat unused for about six weeks with a broken monitor before she got around to buying a new one.

“I’m sort of disabled when it comes to using a computer,” she said.

But Ledeker isn’t concerned about her lack of computer literacy ­— she’s satisfied with her proficiency in penmanship.

“It’s the difference between the human touch and a machine,” she said. “There’s no substitute — the spontaneity, the control, the possibilities.”

Kansan staff writer Matt Erickson can be contacted at merickson@kansan.com.

— Edited by Mark Vierthaler

Discussion

All comments are moderated by Kansan.com staff. For our full user policy, click here.

111 Stauffer-Flint Hall • 1435 Jayhawk Blvd. • Lawrence, Kansas 66045 • (785) 864-4810