G H O S T A R M Y: Short Review on "The Love of Arabic, Ottoman and Persian Calligraphy" Lecture

The presentation and workshop for “The Love of Arabic, Ottoman and Persian Calligraphy” took place on March 18, 2012, hosted by Society For Calligraphy in Los Angeles.

The presenter team took it upon themselves to put together a presentation to tell the story of Arabic calligraphy for the American audience who were interested in this beautiful form of Middle Eastern Art. The presentation covered a brief linguistic history of Arabic script and development of the Kufic Style, followed by an introduction to Square Kufic, Maghribi, Thuluth, Naskh, Muhaqqaq, Rayhan, Ruq’a, Divani, Nasta’liq and Shekasta Nasta’liq. The presentation offered a glimpse at various calligraphy rules for Arabic script and the audiences were pleased to see sample slides showcasing each style and its application.

The next segment of the presentation covered the contemporary art and typography movement set by KHTT Foundation, DecoType, LinoType and a number of independent Arabic type designers. Artworks by Juliet Breton, Wissam Shawkat, Hassan Masoudi, Khalid Shahin, Ibrahim Al-Arrafi, Shukor Yahya, Mohammad Ehsaei, Farhad Moshiri and Bijan Seyfouri were displayed in this section. Beautiful slides from Istanbul brought joy to the eyes of the audience and the presentation came to an end with a short hands-on introduction to basic calligraphy tools.

Payman Hamed from www.persiancalligraphy.org

Payman Hamed, from PersianCalligraphy.org, conducted the workshop where participants got the chance to practice writing a few words in Nasta’liq style. The room was charged with fun and creativity once the participants began to engage in right-to-left writing! It was very impressive to see beautiful curves drawn by art-lovers who were doing Arabic-Persian calligraphy for the first time.