Italic alphabet.

For the last three decades I've been in love with alphabets. Ever since I  ducked into Heffers gallery out of a rain shower and chanced into David Kindersley's "12 alphabets" show. This was a show of his experimental alphabet that he did in seventies, done as screen prints. At seventeen I knew I wanted to be an artist but was rather vague about what that actually meant, it probably amounted to some romantic ideas about bohemian life style and little else but whether as a painter, graphic designer or, god help me,  a performance artist was any bodies guess, I didn't know. I felt an instant affinity to those prints and their subject matter, I responded to the abstract nature of letters. I can't say that I understood them on any deeper technical level then and not for many years to come but I knew what I wanted to do and have pursued that dream ever since.

 I love designing, painting and carving alphabets. The alphabet  gives me the same intellectual challenge as a cross word puzzle does for some other people. A problem to be solved in as elegant and harmonist way as possible. To create a unified whole out of twenty six smaller parts. I love the logic that dictates that if this letter has these qualities then other letters will share them. I love that although it remains the same twenty six characters and in the same order, it can be done in hundreds of different way. Slight changes creating different accents, different moods. I love exploring all the variations and I've been doing it ever since wandering into David Kindersley's "12 alphabets" shows.

Some ten years later or so, I was working for David Kindersley's widow Lida, at the  Cardozo Kindersley workshop. I told her  how that exhibit had focused my life, how from that day I'd started me drawing and thinking about letters and set me on the path to becoming a lettering artist. Later that day Lida gave me one of the prints, a beautiful red and maroon alphabet base on the Lombardic letterform. I've had it framed and its on the wall of my living room, I very fond of it and it still has the power to inspire me.