Calligraphers bring back famous New Zealanders in a unique way
Te Rauparaha, Fred Hollows, James K Baxter and eight other iconic Kiwis are featured in a new exhibition at the Paraparaumu Library on the Kapiti Coast.
Eleven highly-skilled Kapiti calligraphers ( from the Greek, ‘people who produce beautiful handwriting’) have chosen a famous New Zealander to illustrate graphically through handwriting.
One of them, Pam Kessler, hand wrote this report, then transmuted it into a computer document…
‘Iconic Kiwis’
By Pam Kessler
The Calligraphers of Kapiti have a new exhibition titled Iconic Kiwis presently showing at the Community Artspace at the Paraparaumu Library.
Eleven members of our club accepted the challenge of this project and each of us chose a New Zealander that was important to us, and then we designed the calligraphy and artwork that we thought would best represent that person.
Our New Zealand icons cover a wide range of people from Te Rauparaha to Fred Hollows.
Each icon is depicted differently and each piece is unique, except that is, for the size of the work. In the early planning stages it was agreed that we would all work on the same large size of paper so our finished art pieces would have a uniform look.
Unfortunately, we discovered that with large pieces of paper also come large mistakes, which seem to somehow include large blobs of ink where no ink was wanted!
The first eleven
Members of Calligraphers of Kapiti who contributed to this Iconic Kiwis exhibition are – Kate Thurston, Kathleen Fleck, Daniel Reeve, Philip Markham, Helen McIntosh, Hilary Gorringe-Crole, Elise Fountain-Smith, Howard Farr, Maggie Salter, Pauline Markham and me.
Iconic Kiwis is on show until the 11th of November so please pop in and see our work and I hope it gives you as much pleasure to see it as it gave us to create it. If you would like more information about the Calligraphers of Kapiti give me a ring on 902 1806.