Art in Action - Josie Brown
Josie Brown is a talented calligrapher and a very warm and encouraging teacher.
Inevitably we all have to think of a different ways of writing names to demonstrate and engage!
Josie has experimented and had a lot of success with traditional gilding techniques including Persian gilding using gold dust and working with lapis lazuli. Her stand showed her versatility, and had my absolute favourite piece, Hedgerow in Silver, which is written with silverpoint on a titanium-pigment ground with an underpainting of acrylic. You may remember that the scribes used to draw lines in silverpoint on vellum. Silverpoint is exactly what it says it is - a finely ground 'nib' or point of silver which is used without ink, because it leaves a deposit of silver where a nib would usually leave ink. It works well on gesso and was often used for drawings for oil paintings. It can't be erased, so that's why we can see the ruling lines on vellum manuscripts.
This photo doesn't do the work justice, but it's a difficult one to photograph. It really has to be seen in real ife.
By the way there was lots of very exiting artwork at Art in Action - well, with 400 demonstrators, you can imagine! So we'll be there for another week and will still have only scraped the surface!
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