Juxtapose!

There's a simple combo I've been turning out lately with my 6-inch tiles. A tile of course, is once again, a two-dimensional concept.......

Because I've moved down here to the American Southwest, I've discovered that the huge tall saguaro cactus (pron. sah-wah-ro) is a visual concept that is very easy to draw, or represent in two dimensions (I'll get to the tile in a minute). And this is proved by all the hundreds of published photographs of same: picturesque saguaros throughout the media-realms, in so many magazines and newspapers and ads and TV shows, and paintings and decorative themes!

And in the ceramics studio, there are some glazes that you might call "randomly explosive"glazes: there's one that turns out to look exactly like the Milky Way galaxy, and it's a perfect background for my doodled saguaro cactus in the foreground! Point is, a person can juxtapose one simple shape in the center, or foreground of, say, a 6" tile, with a crazy pattern in the background, and it works!

Names and Titles

Centuries ago, when reading and writing were not that common, the monks in the monasteries were busy reading and writing, and the writing they were doing was not on a typewriter, nor heaven forbid, on a computer or on any kind of keyboard such as we know today. I've got to say that the writing they turned out back in those days was calligraphy and calligraphy only. How many of you have seen a copy even of our [more recent] Declaration of Independence in this country, or of the Magna Carta in ancient Europe or such documents. These things were all turned out by a scribe or scribes: persons whose professions and livelihood were those of copying things down.

It may have not been as easy to read, or to decipher, as the typeset that shows up today, but it was much more beautiful. Beautiful and flowery and impressive.

Today such qualities are some of the main reasons why calligraphy is used in the various ways and places it is used: to decorate, to impact, to glorify, to draw the attention, to beautify!