Calligraphy Workshop

As part of the European Heritage Days organized in Wimereux by the Association of Friends of the Church.

Heritage and teaching: learning for life!

Come alone, with family, or with friends, (basically, come as you are), learn, and entertain yourself, in an atmosphere of recreational classes, on the theme of the material and intangible heritage of the (local) church, and of the (universal) church. Both are vectors of education, by the transmission of the knowledge that they have extended within the city and beyond, and the know-how that they have generated and maintained from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Among the workshops proposed to illustrate the know-how passed down from generations: Atelier Calligraphie, presented by Richard Roullier.
Passionate about calligraphy, Richard Roullier resumes for the JEP 2020 the path of workshops that he regularly led, intervening in schools or during medieval festivals. This Saint-Martinois considers above all this art as a contemplative act...
The gesture is safe and concentrated. Harmonious to look at, as well as its final result... No doubt, calligraphy is good, etymological, the art of beautiful writing!
It is a meditative art, which corresponds well to the state of mind of the copyist monks. With calligraphy, Richard Roullier likes to reproduce sentences with great metaphysical depth: medieval philosophers, but also contemporary, or even Chinese Tao Te King.
These chosen words, he draws them with calames (bamboo or cane rods), metal feathers, «automatic pen», pieces of cardboard or goose feather, his favorite tool «because it is the traditional tool of Latin calligraphy... I feel like I’m stepping into the footsteps of our ancestors»... Ancestors who no doubt knew the secrets of calligraphy: always hold the tool with the same angle on the sheet, have a supple and loose hand movement, and never take a line back. We have to accept imperfection and integrate it into what we are doing. '
The practice of calligraphy is based in large part on a fruitful history of several millennia. The great diversity of writings from which we can draw reflects the psychology of peoples. They are the traces left by men as they travel, complex paths taken over time and the ups and downs of history, big or small.
In the West, it is the art of copyist monks, but also great calligraphers charged with contributing to the prestige of the sovereigns and the aristocracy. In this, the work of the calligraphers was more in the search for a perfect performance serving the glory of their patrons, than a purely «aesthetic» quest, a very contemporary notion.
Latin calligraphy evolved from ancient Rome, passing through the Middle Ages and the cultural revolution, Gutenberg and typography, the Renaissance and Chancellery writing, musical writing, the civilization of the book, the revolution of the digital. It is therefore expressed under different techniques: the Roman capital, the rustica, the onciale, the merovingian, the Gothic, the chancery, the English... and each of these techniques comes according to families that are its own...
At the time of the Internet, we might think that manual writing is obsolete. It is not. An expression of body and mind, calligraphy fascinates. Unlike cold and impersonal e-mails, it is the way to convey much more than information. The manual transcription, like a seismograph, reveals the human soul.