A Love Letter to Penmanship BY DANA HUCH
If Patricia Sullivan’s handwriting were a performance it would be an opera. Her thick downstrokes bellow with confidence as they glide, plump and graceful, across her page stage. Her soprano upstrokes tiptoe, elegant and stringlike, lightening the tone of the letter. Her whole arm bounces and swings to a tempo as she conducts with a pen baton, telling the inky song how to flow. There is a balance of purposeful composure and expressive freedom in the performance — wild and fast movements followed by slow and careful ones. Sullivan has dedicated intense time and effort to the craft of elegant penmanship. Even through developing her career as a graphic designer in tech vanguard Silicon Valley, she has held tightly to her pen and anachronistic appreciation for the handwritten word. With each advancement, it becomes increasingly apparent that nearly every modern task can be completed more efficiently with the right tool. Sullivan appreciates all of the possibilities new technologies offer, but has realized the value of staying loyal to the art of hand-lettering, now more than ever. Sullivan discovered her passion for penmanship very early on. In her childhood home, a Butte, Montana “bungalow,” she and her three siblings learned how to refine their alphabet with lessons from their mother and grandmother. Sullivan said her artistic side comes from her mother, who would slip handwritten notes into her school
Sullivan and her siblings captured on a home movie.
Sullivan writes her name. bag and make Valentines with sewn-on lace. Her mother nurtured the young artist in Sullivan, teaching her how to translate love into the written word with an uncommon attention to detail. “[My mother] made such a loving home for us back in Montana,” Sullivan said. “We didn’t have a lot of money or anything but she used her artistic talents to create a life of beauty for all of us.” Sullivan described her other penmanship teacher —her maternal grandmother— as “very kind, but very strict.” In addition to their customary penmanship hour in school, Sullivan and her siblings endured an additional hour or two of penmanship exercises with their grandmother when they arrived home. Sullivan’s grandmother saw refined handwriting as a sign of status and formality, so felt it was important that the children practiced a certain technique.
Sullivan’s Valentine keepsakes from her mother.
Sullivan practices the penmanship exercises she learned as a child. Her grandmother made repetitive loops and zig-zags up and down the letter space on a chalkboard and encouraged the children to imitate her use of the whole arm when forming letters. Sullivan used to think these mechanics were impossible to translate into her small paper and desk space. But now, having mastered it, she said full arm movement is what makes hand-lettering so satisfying to her. “She was preparing us for smooth transitions of letters and just creating a beautiful hand that would help us going forward in our lives,” Sullivan said. Her grandmother’s lessons continue to influence the creative work Sullivan does today, she said. Rooted in her childhood and family values, penmanship has become attached to a deeper sense of self for Sullivan and the familiar movements carry memories from hours spent practicing in her childhood home. Her handwriting is a sort of inheritance from her mother’s side. “I was trained to do penmanship in a formal way from the very beginning and I didn’t really ever stray from that,” Sullivan said. “I felt like my penmanship was kind of part of my identity.” When Sullivan began taking lecture notes as a typography and design student at Stanford University, however, meticulous attention to the details of each letter had to take a back seat for practicality. Her once fluid curves and angles became a
pragmatic scrawl. “My mother said, ‘Wow, Patricia! I can’t believe how messy your writing has gotten!’” Sullivan said, laughing. “And I was like, ‘Mother, I can’t keep up with the notetaking if I’m making the perfect capital F. I just can’t do it!’ So I gave myself permission to be messy. As soon as I graduated from college, I went back to my cleaner version of penmanship.”
College-age Sullivan writes by hand.
In the professional world, Sullivan had time to recover her perfect F and may, in fact, have spent hours crafting a capital F for her work as a typographer. During the 1980s, her designs were all done by hand. Each letter required outlining, inking, and refining the points with a scraping blade. But not long into her time as a graphic designer working with physical media, computers advanced and suddenly replaced what she had been perfecting for so many years. “I can remember being amazed that I could create a capital A in a Sans Serif font and print it out on a piece of paper without having to hand-letter it,” Sullivan said. “[Before computer printing,] we had to painstakingly create every edge of a large Sans Serif A and ink it with
“I think it’s really nice to concentrate on the letter form and be in the moment. Be present right now and really focus on your every move.”
Sullivan shows her graphic design work with calligraphic elements. black ink and black paint brushes and calligraphic pens. It was painstaking and we took pride in it. And then suddenly, boom. It could be printed out like that.” This immediate evolution was an unforgiving transition and demanded a great deal of flexibility from graphic designers if they wanted to stay in the industry. “I think there was a whole generation of people who lost their work and lost their sense of identity with the introduction of computers in our society,” Sullivan said. “What was considered a craft and something very valuable suddenly became common.” Sullivan was able to adapt and take advantage of the many creative possibilities the change offered and her classic training has served her well even in the fully digital mode of design, she said. Because of the principles she learned in school and from her mother and grandmother, Sullivan’s designs take a traditional approach, usually featuring elegant calligraphic fonts.
Pen and paper no longer occupied the forefront of her professional life, but Sullivan couldn’t leave it behind as easily as many others have seemed to in favor of faster tools. In a survey of 2,000 people in England organized by a printing and mailing company, a third of the respondents reported that they had not handwritten anything in the past six months. Sullivan, on the other hand, finds random ways to satisfy her urge to put pen to paper many times each day. “I think it’s really nice to concentrate on the letter form and be in the moment,” Sullivan said. “Be present right now and really focus on your every move. …Sometimes I’ll sit with a piece of paper and just write my name and the names of all my friends and family in different ways.” Sullivan describes this practice as a grounding meditation, a mindset she has in common with master Chinese calligrapher Xing-An-Ping. Xing is revered for his talent and dedication; his entire lifestyle is centered around his practice. The degree of intensity he applies involves mental preparation before creating and perspiration during.
Xing-An-Ping wipes sweat after finishing a piece. “Every day he doesn’t touch his brush, doesn’t smell his ink, he’s going to be uncomfortable,” his translator explained. Chinese calligraphy is an art form that holds memories thousands of years old. Some parks in China exhibit the works of ancient masters to be studied in the natural landscape which inspired them. Visitors come to observe the intangible parallels between the natural world and the artist’s translation as well as reconnect with a cultural treasure untouched by modern technology. The primordial pictograph, deemed defunct, again finds its place among trees and bamboo. For Sullivan, penmanship holds personal and family history. She was moved to tears at the memories of her mother’s handwritten notes. “I think it’s just intrinsic to being human,” Sullivan said. “I don’t want us to lose that in this hurried life that we’re living right now.”
Sullivan laughs during her interview.
About the Author
Dana Huch is a Junior at Freestyle Academy and Los Altos High School. She studies film as her Freestyle elective. Outside of school, Dana writes for the local student newspaper, the Midpeninsula Post.