Friedrich Poppl's Ruling Pen Minuscule 2

This is a close up section of a rendering of the Latin phrase "verba docent, exempla trahunt" which means "words instruct, illustrations lead." 

This illustration emulates the Ruling Pen Minuscule 2 script of German calligrapher Friedrich Poppl.  His font dates from the 1960s.  I am creating this work on an iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil in the Adobe Draw app and opened in Photoshop to create texture and embossing.  This is a work in progrss, so I am not sure how it will conclude.  I envision a poster and in a different color.

Apart from admiring Poppl's work, I admire his determination.  Here is a short piece on Poppl's challenging life as an amputee and prisoner of war.       

Desire

"Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything." ~Napoleon Hill

Sontag's Journal: Furtive Reading for Parents and Lovers

Susan Sontag wrote:

"On Keeping a Journal. Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts — like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather — in many cases — offers an alternative to it.

There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does not mean that what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves is deep. Confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow than actions. I am thinking now of what I read today (when I went up to 122 Bd. St-G to check for her mail) in H’s journal about me — that curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment of me which concludes by her saying that she really doesn’t like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune. God knows it hurts, and I feel indignant and humiliated. We rarely do know what people think of us (or, rather, think they think of us).. . .Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal. Will H. ever read this?"

-From The New York Times article On Self, published September 10, 2006

Sontag died December 28, 2004.  I am reading her journals and wonder if H. ever did.

Digital Calligraphy

Oh, what you can do digitally with one little painted A.

Sonnet Tucked Away

I don't like poetry as a general rule.   I do, however, love the following by Edna St. Vincent Millay which I socked away in a drawer on a little piece of crumpled, folded paper:

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink and rise and sink and rise and sink again.

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by need and moaning for release

Or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It may well be. I do not think I would.