I’m Ian
I’ve been fascinated by letters since I was very young, and have practised Calligraphy since I was a teenager. In my ‘proper job’ people that I’ve just met often start meetings by saying ‘I love your handwriting!’
This has led me onto learning to cut letters in stone – which I love doing.
I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from Tom Perkins, Eric Marland, John Neilsen and other notable lettercutters.
It is a creative outlet, but also a meditative practice. I often find that I can lose a whole afternoon, sometimes a whole day, in cutting.
Why stone?
‘Verba volent, scripta manent‘ (‘spoken words fly away, the written word remains’) is a latin tag that many letter cutters have cut, and which sums up why I like cutting in stone – it feels permanent (although visiting a country church yard and seeing the de-laminating slate stones, or the limestone ones obliterated by acid rain suggests otherwise). This sense of permanence has a number of outcomes – you want to ensure that what you are cutting is worth committing to stone, and that you do it as well as you can.
Measure twice, cut once…
Cutting is exciting – I always have this urge to get on with it, but the painful truth is that it is the design stage; the drawing and laying out, that is the make or break element of any project. I’ve been working more and more on making my own lettering better – I recently completed an online course on Brush Trajans with Yves Leterme, and with John Stevens on Modern Gothic. I am a member of Plymouth Calligraphers.