Western Calligraphy: The Uncial Form

Video Transcript

"But, let's just say I'm going to take these basic shapes and I'm going to just, see that change? See the change from that A to that A? And then the game, of course, is to follow it through. And there could easily be modern uses for this. Now, remember, that we went from, then we went on our magical history tour from uncials and we made our way to the insiar half uncials which was the, which was the Celtic Art, OKay? And, here's an example of a piece the I did for you that's using that old Irish hand. And, this is a take-off, this is a very cartoon like version of a little figure that was used, or something like this was used in Celtic Art. Now, one of the really fun things about some of the more lavish manuscripts like the Book of Kells, is that they had all kinds of elaborate fabulous colors and they also had what are called zoomorphic forms. And this is a, this is a post card of a very large painting that I did of a, sort of a modern take off on the idea of a Celtic zoomorphic form. So, maybe that looks like a lion to you. You can tell me, but obviously it's fierce, it has teeth and everything. But this business of the black and the white, for example, and the dots are definitely taken from the Book of Kells. But the tongue in cheek about this particular piece was that it was very large and, in fact, Linder's Fine Gospels, Book of Kells, even though they were relatively large manuscripts, when it came down to doing these details, they were, unbelievably elaborate, unbelievably elaborate and very, very tiny. Very, very tiny. Try this for our next lesson."