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In October I attended a lecture and two workshops presented by Aidan Meehan and hosted by The Calligraphic Arts Guild of Toronto.
The Thursday night lecture consisted of a quick history of Half-Uncials and illuminated Irish manuscripts, and a demonstration of a method for drawing a five square grid derived by the presenter from a study of the Book of Lindisfarne.
The workshops offered two of the sixteen alphabets developed by Aidan Meehan and published in his tenth book, Celtic Alphabets. These letters were all developed from examples found in ancient manuscripts from Ireland and England. They would have been the secondary or intermediate letters frequently seen in Celtic illumination where the large illuminated capital is harmonized with the text by use of smaller, less decorated capitals in the body of the text. These secondary capitals are smaller than the main capital but still larger than the text. Thus there is a diminuendo of size and proportion in the Half-Uncial script.
The first workshop, a one-day event, featured the Single Spiral Alphabet (number 2 in Celtic Alphabets). These capitals are based on the Cathach (pronounced “Ca – hak”) Psalter, which dates back to the year 600 CE. The illumination in this manuscript is very minimalist but can be seen as the germ of the illumination found in the much later Book of Durrow.
We began by strapping two pencils together, with the right lead lower than the left. (One member of the class had a neat double pencil holder purchased from a quilting store.) The pencils are at the correct angle if they make a single line when drawn horizontally.
To determine the pen angle for lettering Half-Uncial, two nib width squares were drawn side by side to make an oblong.
The diagonal gives the 22.5° angle. The shallow angle gives Half-Uncial its character. One can think of the round letters being based on a triangular shape with 3 nodes.
Time was also spent practicing flag serifs, another significant feature of this alphabet.
Simplist-Informal
Formal-involves
pen manipulation
from
horizontal to 22.5 instroke #3
We then made the letters 7 to 9 nib widths high and decorated them with single spirals.
Two types of spiral were demonstrated:
Clock spring coil Snail
shell
or aritmetic or geometric
A spiral, or combination of spirals, must have at least two full turns to create an enclosed area.
One can “come back out” of a spiral to make a club terminus, which may be coloured red. The club terminus can be further developed to produce fish, bird or dog heads.
Letters in the Single Spiral Alphabet may be further embellished by outlining with a double row of red dots.
Days two and three were devoted to the Lace Knot Alphabet (number 6 in Celtic Alphabets) derived from examples in the Book of Kells. Starting with a left pointing chevron, one of the most primitive forms of funerary decoration, we extended it to make a simple pretzel knot.
Having decided on the nib width for the letter one determines the minimum cell size needed for the knot work - a square with sides 3x the nib width.
These majuscules were first drawn in pencil, then completed with a felt tip pen or pen and ink. Each participant then lettered a word which could be used in a Holiday greeting. I chose “GLORY”. One of the things I particularly enjoyed during the workshops was the teacher’s frequent use of interesting historical anecdotes.
Hazel McGraw