2.1 Ideocalligraphy, its history and sources

In 1970, on my birthday, I visited the British Museum's Department of Egyptology. Before leaving I treated myself to a well illustrated book on Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions. And the hieroglyphs were without question beautiful, both individually and in sequence. The pictographic definition of each hieroglyph was faultless. And yet their phonetic values and meaning remained inaccessible to all but Egyptologists. For all their beauty and hidden history, on that day they struck me as static and detached.

Round about that time I had become aware of new areas of meaning I needed to explore - beyond poetry and wood sculpture. Sitting with the hieroglyphs on my knees in that London Underground train, it came to me that what I needed was a new, non-phonetic and wordless ideocalligraphic script with which to explore meaning. By the time the escalator brought me to the surface I had decided to start work exploring pictographic systems and hunting out the pictographic elements in the art of past and present cultures.

I needed a starting point. For advice I sought out a friend, Simon Cave, in his translating agency. On his wall there was a chart of early Chinese radical characters, perhaps five hundred of them - with their English primary meanings. He pointed out to me that were I to come up with an explicit ideograph for each of those radical meanings, I could then start building composites. I was allowed to borrow the chart. And I remain deeply in his debt.

As work progressed the sources multiplied: Egyptian hieroglyphs, North American pictograms, Maya glyphs, Chinese and Japanese scripts, Medieval manuscript marginalia, Illuminated manuscripts and their marginalia, Palaeolithic cave paintings, and the decorative arts of the Scythian, Mayan, Maori and countless other cultures. The search is unending. As the ideocalligraphs were derived from or influenced by these early sources and others closer to our own day, it was my hope that they would thus prove accessible to a wide range of cultures in our globally oriented world of today. These first steps on the journey were taken in pre-internet days. Ideocalligraphy is now old enough to travel, via internet, the cloud and whatever comes next. Remember - Ideocalligraphy and its ideocalligraphs carry no copyright. Deriving from us all they belong to us all.