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HER NIBS: Miller teaches calligraphy
online to students as far-flung as Germany and
Japan.
Glenn Matsumura |
AFTER 1978, when a California
funding crisis short-circuited a tenure-track job teaching
art, Ann Balaam Miller was “irked for quite a
while.” She had studied painting and lithography
at Stanford with Nathan Oliveira and Richard Diebenkorn
and enjoyed working with students in turn. It was frustrating
to have “all these teaching ideas that never reached
fruition.”
A career in calligraphy would flourish instead. She
“inhaled” the alphabets of the ages—such
lusciously named styles as Uncial, Carolingian, Gothic
and more—and put them to work for such clients
as Hewlett-Packard, Borel Private Bank and Trust Company,
and Stanford. (The large dedication framed in the lobby
of the Robert A. Chase Hand & Upper Limb Center
in the School of Medicine came from her pen.) She does
proclamations, hand addressing, and logo design. She
and a partner sell motivational art prints at their
company, The Positive Edge. Interior designers smitten
with beautifully lettered quotations on walls call her,
although Miller often declines because she “doesn’t
do ladders.” She recently finished serving two
years as president of The Friends of Calligraphy, a
nonprofit society of professional and amateur scribes.
But in the past year, the Academy of Art University
in San Francisco lured her back to teaching—and
in a manner that might seem as incongruous as a monk
with a Xerox machine. Miller teaches a fully accredited
calligraphy course online. In its first semester, six
students—three from the Bay Area, one in Colorado,
one in Germany and one in Japan—perfected their
serifs without meeting Miller in person.
Although Miller acknowledges that she can’t adjust
a student’s grip on the pen, she says distance
learning can be a boon for new calligraphers. Working
with videographers from the school, Miller recorded
demonstrations for 15 class modules. Students can work
through the modules at their convenience and watch the
close-up demonstrations repeatedly. They scan their
work and post it so Miller and their classmates can
see their progress. Miller writes back comments and
answers questions throughout the week. Each student
mails a final project to her—a handmade portfolio
book.
The modules include readings, slide shows of archival
and contemporary calligraphy, discussion topics and
quizzes. In the video demonstrations, letters appear
stroke-by-meticulous-stroke from Miller’s hand,
while her voice describes their precise angles and proportions.
(Practice sheets might start with a tiny column of hyphen-wide
marks stacked alternately to left and right, so they
look like a stylized head of wheat. In this way, the
height of a page’s letters has been determined
by the width of the pen nib—five nib-widths tall,
for example, for Textura Quadrata.) Once an alphabet
has been taught, the week’s assignment might ask
students to use that style to present a pangram—a
sentence that uses each of the 26 letters.
Some demonstrations focus on tools. In one, Miller
cuts a pen from bamboo. In another, a folded pen nib
is shaped and annealed from the aluminum of a soda can.
One of calligraphy's joys, she says, is the sensuousness
of its materials: the “creamy” feel of a
$100 piece of vellum, the incense released when a stick
of ink is ground.
Miller has been pleased with the quality of her students’
work, recognizing in them the perseverative nature of
a good calligrapher: “someone who'll do something
40 times for the pleasure of it.”
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