September is always the busiest month for the Alphabets, and the rush began this past weekend with the first of three major public appearances: in the Sterling Hardwoods wood shop on Pine Street as part of the South End Art Hop in Burlington, Vermont. (For the other two events, see the end of this article.) […]
Yes, thanks to the wonderful photography of Tom Way, who even helped me carry the table up the impossibly steep and rickety staircase to his studio, you can finally see the dining table I started more than a year ago. Here’s the story. When I moved into my rather anonymous little townhouse, I promised myself […]
While other members of our team are developing digitized font versions of endangered alphabets and coloring books for Bangladesh, I’ve been recovering from knee replacement surgery in the usual way–by carving. Thanks to the excellent Tom Way of Tom Way Photography, here are a few of the results, all of which are available on our […]
Wow. Even as your intrepid Endangered Alphabets team (Maung Nyeu, our friend and collaborator from the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, calligrapher/printer Jamie Kutner, Cindy Barnes, myself, and invisible back-in-Vermont laser-dude Paul Ledak) are recovering from several weeks of intense exertion and excitement, it’s time to tell you what actually happened down there on the National Mall. […]
When I started the Endangered Alphabets Project, I hoped it would take me to many strange places and lead to many unusual experiences. Eating squirrel was not on my list. Nor was Iceland. My flight paused at Keflavik, the island capital’s airport, and I was looking forward to seeing, if only from the air on […]
The Alphabets have had an amazing week and a half: their first European tour. Many adventures to tell, but the first challenge was simply getting them there. To ship the original exhibition in its trunk would have cost nearly $1,000 each way, so I created The Alphabets Lite: twelve slightly smaller carvings in curly maple, […]
One of the most stunning woods in the world is paduak (pronounced pa-duke, at least in Vermont, and confusingly spelled “padauk” as often as not), an exotic tropical hardwood from central and West Africa and Southeast Asia. In its raw, sanded form it’s a brilliant tigerish orange striped with gold and darker reds and browns. […]
