GHOSTWRITERS

March 7 – April 7, 2007  Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts

These paintings are the outcome of my exploration of 19th-century vernacular penmanship. Handwriting manuals were legion at that time, a central part of a national craze for self-improvement that was sweeping America—even the remote reaches of homesteads in the West. Vestiges of elementary mark-making—alphabets, signatures, animals, equations—serve as counterpoints to my looser treatment of line, edge and space. One hundred and fifty years later, my paintings navigate between the rigors of those perfect lines and my own imperfect brushes. 

                                        Circumference (detail) 60 x 72 inches,

                                        2006, oil on canvas

The personal signatures of men and women living in mid-19th century America reflect the universal indoctrination into Spencerian penmanship. Penmanship training, in pursuit of a certain standarized perfection in handwriting, emphasized the negation of the individual hand. Of late, I have become particularly interested in ferreting out those instances of deviation from the rules of writing. The simultaneous, conflicted Victorian longing for convention and the passion for flourished excess can be detected in the signatures of everyday people.

In uncovering marginalia and doodles on workbook endpapers of the period, one can see the human impulse to let the mind stray, with pen in hand. Although we think of doodles as liberated from any rules, in these quoted artifacts one can see the influence of typical Spencerian training in proper penmanship, thus placing the scrawls and wiggles into historical context. Digital technology has replaced the handwritten page—but the doodle will forever remain a form of self-expression.

The penmanship instructor’s original intent of control, resolution and clarity is often obscured by placing these lines and letters into deep fields of saturated color. But what emerges, I hope, is a reanimation of these strokes and perhaps a reconsideration of the expressiveness of the written word.

Catherine Courtenaye

Summer 2006