B/W

BRODY WRITES BLACK WHITE

A Catalog of Calligraphic Ecstasies by Brody Neuenschwander

My big black book is ready for print! After more than three years of hard work I am proud to present 30 years of my black and white calligraphy. This is a hefty volume, with 300 pages of logos, alphabets, graphic design, public commissions, art works, designs for glass, metal, textiles, sculptures, experiments, and more. It is my personal vision of what calligraphy can be when the boundaries are pushed to their limits and beyond.

B/W is an invitation to rummage through the drawers of my plan chests, a chance to see what has fascinated me and driven my creative process. The book catalogs my obsession with ink and its conflicted relationship with language.

I have tried to be a rebel in the calligraphy world, exploring ideas and materials that calligraphers tend to ignore, learning from the worlds of conceptual art, text art, and graffiti. I have absorbed ideas from Asia, learned from Apollinaire, excavated in the sands of history. These explorations have all found their way into my calligraphy.

B/W contains a boisterous conversation with Ewan Clayton, Lara Taveirne, Monika Marek-Łucka, and Ewa Satalecka. They ask some tough and probing questions about my artistic ideas, studio practice, and personal journey. Ten fingers and a brain tried their best to answer.

If you are looking for inspiration for your graphic design, logo design, and calligraphy, this book provides hundreds of new ideas. If you simply love the graphics of the line, you will enjoy my catalog of calligraphic ecstasies. If you are fascinated by visual language, each page is an exploration of how we read, how we decipher, how we communicate.

This is my life’s work. I offer it to you with great joy. I hope you will add it to your library. Thank you!

B/W will be published in September 2026. I am offering a special price for those who order before 1 June 2026:

Price for orders placed before 1 June 2026                          75 euro      /    US +-$85

Price for orders placed after 1 June 2026                             95 euro      /    US +-$110

Signed edition with original artwork

by Brody Neuenschwander (ordered at any time)              250 euro     /   US +-$290 

Pre-order at www.brodyonline.com/product-category/books/

SPECIFICATIONS:

Format: 340×240 mm landscape

Volume: 320 pages, paper 120gm

Binding: Thread-sewn, hard bound

A virtual tour of the book is available:

What a fabulous year it has been! After many months of preparation, Casa Verna finally welcomed its first students in September. Amity, Ellen, and I were delighted to host 11 students and several of their partners in our house/art center in Umbria. The classroom buzzed with new creation as students made personal books recording important moments in their lives. (More on that in the next blog.) For now, a few pictures of our students (and new friends!) during their stay with us.

We started with a reception on the newly restored terrace, the sun going down in Tiepolo colors over the hills. In the ancient kitchen, my wife Nadine and our great friend Goedele Soetewey (a fine calligrapher and letter cutter) prepared a traditional Italian meal. Italy is food, and we made sure the students enjoyed the best we could offer, including Nadine’s world-class tiramisu and a trip to the local pizza place.

There were field trips too: Spoleto, Assisi, and Perugia. Assisi is less than an hour from Casa Verna and is one of the most magical places in all of Italy. The tiny cloister of San Damiano, just outside the medieval city walls, is the most perfectly tranquil place on earth. The spirit of Claire and Francis can still be felt there, reminding us to stop and praise the beautiful world around us. The great basilica of San Francesco, home to the largest cycle of frescoes in Europe, simply takes your breath away.

And then there is Perugia, where I studied Italian in my youth. Every visit is a nostalgia overload for me, which I love sharing with the students. The ancient Moretti-Caselli stained glass studios send me into a downward spiral of dreaming, taking me back to the days when calligraphy for me was still closely tied to medieval ideas of craftsmanship. From there it is only a few steps to the Biblioteca Augusta and their great collection of medieval manuscripts. No white gloves or glass cases here. Students were allowed to turn the pages of the illuminated manuscripts themselves, giving them a chance to get up close and explore the whole book.

Classroom time was intense. Students were ambitious and very talented. The show-and-tell on the last day was an emotional experience as people shared important moments in their lives.

While all this was going on, Amity’s husband Glenn and a couple of the partners harvested our olives. It was a bumper year. In the autumn, all of Umbria talks about only two things: the wild boar hunt and the resa of the olive harvest (i.e. how many liters of oil per hundred kilo olives). We had a great resa – 11% – and were able to treat students to bruschetta with freshly pressed oil on the last night. Amity, industrious as ever, has already bottled and labelled her oil with the Casa Verna label.

It was total immersion in authentic Italy for two weeks. Medieval cities, illuminated manuscripts, artistic creation, great food and wine, new friendships, the olive harvest……is there anything missing from this picture?  Amity, Ellen, and I are so pleased to be able to share this with our students.  We hope you will join us at Casa Verna too!

Cheers to our builders!

You’ve all read the stories about rebuilding a house in Italy or Provence. They often seem to be tales of disaster and distress. Not with us in Rapicciano. Our wonderful builder Narciso Piccioni (yes, you read it right: Narcissus the Dove) took us through the difficulties of restoring an ancient house with creativity and grace.

Nadine and I pulled a trailer full of household stuff across the Alps, arriving in April to a castello full of dust. It was late and we just managed to take the dusty tarp off a bed, find the sheets, and collapse. Next day the Herculean task of cleaning, sorting, schlepping furniture, and making the house livable began. More on this in a later blog.

Amity and Glenn arrived a little later. That gave us the chance (sadly without Ellen, our third partner) to celebrate the end of the rebuilding with a lunch for Narciso. plumber Gaetano, and electrician Paulo. Here’s to you, gentlemen! You did a great job and also taught me lots of new words in Italian (cartongesso, viti, tubo, scaldare, termosifone….all so useful in daily life).

Here are a few photos of the house. Miracles have been wrought. The horrid pink bathroom has become an elegant white bathroom with chic lighting. The basement storage room has become the summer kitchen (not quite finished but functioning very well for a house full of students). The living room has been furnished by my mother in Texas. I’ll give you that full and fascinating story soon.

Bedrooms, some also thanks to that 40-foot container from Texas, are country-comfy. There’s still a lot to do, but the house now feels like home.

Of course, there’s always the knick-knacks. What was that mantra in the 70s? Accessorize, accessorize!!!! And so, I am happy to report, the Roman amphora left behind by the previous owner, which survived all the drills, cement mixers, rolls of cable, lengths of pipe, and all the rest, could be carried up the stairs and given a place of honor. It means a lot to us, this ancient amphora. We have olive trees of our own and had a great harvest this year (thanks to Glenn and his team). It is a wonderful feeling to join this ancient tradition of harvesting the olives and sharing the oil with students, friends, and family.

I’ll finish with a photo of me sitting (for once and not for long) on the roof terrace on a beautiful Umbrian evening. What are my thoughts? Of the students who would soon arrive, of the studio and what I hope to do there, of friends who will visit, of a great new project, of a dream realized….

I am excited to announce that four new recorded courses have been added to the BrodyOnline teaching series. If you want to challenge yourself to create new and fascinating letterforms, these courses are for you. My “Wrong Letter” concept will push you outside your comfort zone and into a new zone of fun, play, and experiment. You will receive dozens of handouts and hours of videos showing every step of the process. Extra materials include recorded lectures on a range of calligraphic subjects and crit sessions of past students’ work. My courses are thorough, clear, and richly illustrated, giving you plenty of new ideas and inspirations.

In these four courses you will learn how to make them:

• Wrong Letters Part 1: Graphic Contrast with an Automatic Pen
• Wrong Letters Part 2: Fat and Juicy with a Pointed Brush
• Wrong Letters Part 3: Lustrous Layered Colors
• Wrong Letters Part 4: The Comb Pen and the Brody Pen

Welcome to my world of unique, playful, and personal letters, where every letter is wrong and every letter is right!

Sign up now!

A peek into my portfolio

Join me on Monday, February 6, 2023, at 8:00pm Brussels time as I open my portfolio and share with you some of the works I have made in the last few years.

You can look over my shoulder, ask questions, and hear my thoughts on how my collages, wrong letter compositions, and other works on paper are created.

I have never worked in just one style. One work is precise, tight, and controlled. Another is full of splatters and smudges. Some are in full color. Others black and white. All are part of my exploration of what makes calligraphy an artform.

The dialogue between art and craft is always there, always bothering me. I have doubts, frustrations, and occasional moments of elation.

And of course, there are always more ideas than I can bring to completion.

Please join me in an online visit to my studio – you may help me figure out where to go from here!

How to join?

Register as a student on brodyonline.com. Log into your account.
If you are already registered on this website, just log into your account.

Go to the free course (https://www.brodyonline.com/courses/a-peak-into-my-portfolio/) and hit the ‘enroll’ button.

How to join on Zoom?

Download and install the free Zoom client on https://zoom.us/download

Sediments. Layers. Fragments. Calling up memories, revealing hidden ideas, conjuring a work of art out of experience. This is what we do every day in the search for meaning in life. Collage is my way of channeling all this energy into my art. I do not begin with an idea or even a theme. I begin with a piece of Chinese rice paper, a brush, and a stretched piece of Rives. Matter, not mind.

Words bubble up when they are ready and find their way to the surface. The process is physical, noisy, a little unsettling. Letters are pounded into the surface with metal punches and a hammer. Take a punch, place it, hit it. It’s more like playing the drums than writing a text. But a text emerges anyway. I am often surprised by the poetry that is born from this process. Parole in libertá. Words in freedom. They hardly need my guidance to settle into meaningful patterns.

You may say, “Brody, you are just delaying the moment when you have to take responsibility for the work you are creating.” You would be right. I put that moment off as long as possible. Finally, there is no choice. I have to look at the thing I have (not) made, read the words I have (not) written and decide how to complete the work. This is when I start to dig around in my trays of papers, sorted into colors, languages, centuries, variations of beige, ivory, and gray. Here it is! Just the piece I need. I paste it down and only then realize how perfect the words are.

The calligraphy is the hard part. What letters will complete the message? What associations, emotions, graphic values are needed? This stage can go right. Or very wrong. Another layer of collage is always possible.

Layers of thoughts, layers of words. What better metaphor for our inner lives?

I would love to share my collage process with you. My two-month online course, “Collage for Calligraphers and Other Artists” begins on March 6, 2023.  Enroll at www.brodyonline.com

Inspiration can come from things so close that we hardly notice them. Weeding the garden, for example. The exquisite tuft of grass at the center of this triptych, dried to a crisp by the Italian sun, demanded my attention. The sun had transformed its colors to a concert of dusty reds, gray ochers, and brilliant blood orange. My eyes could hardly grasp its beauty. That job would fall to my fingers and a fine sable brush.

I had prepared three collages using my whitewash technique. One, with a layer of cola pen writing under the cloud of chalk, offered its surface to my clump of weeds. You can imagine how the thought of Dürer’s tuft of grass humbled me. He must have been a young man at the time. It took +3 reading glasses to reveal the wonderful world in these slips of dried color. Talk about getting in the zone! An entire afternoon passed as I tried to paint as much detail as I could see.

Cola pen writing fills the left panel of the triptych and a collage of old book pages the right panel. As I finished the collage and pasted the title page of the dismantled book on the central axis, I read these words: “La Vie de la Cellule Végétale.” How do these happy accidents happen?

This triptych has a calm, tranquil air about it. My fingers itched for more action. A fourth collage became a battleground of gestures without words. And then with words. My metal letter stamps channeled this mysterious text from an unknown source: “…more intimate and more heartfelt than the ones that came before. One touch, one stroke, one whisper cannot be compared to another. The nerve endings in fingertips, the resonance of vocal cords, the surface of skin all change with the seasons and with the years. We wake and we sleep, dozing through delights and staring past miracles. The fire must burn to be felt at all.”

I am excited to announce that “Shaping Your Story” starts on September 5, 2022 on BrodyOnline.

The course will run for four months, giving you the chance to go deeply into your story as you create a multi-faceted artist’s book.

Week by week we will experiment with different ways of visualizing your words, mining them for meaning and using them as springboards for all sorts of calligraphic experiments.

On my blog you can see short film explaining how the course will work. “Shaping Your Story” is a four-month journey of personal discovery.

We all have questions about our ability to express our feelings and turn them into works of art. I truly believe this course will help you to do just that!

Join at https://www.brodyonline.com/courses/september-december-2022-shaping-your-story-calligraphy-and-other-artistic-approaches/

On May 7, 2022, from 18:00 to 21:00, Brussels time, we will hold a new and very special performance of “A Brush with Silence.” As bombs thunder down on innocent people, 15 calligraphers will sit quietly in an exquisitely beautiful chapel in Bruges and write words of peace in 15 different scripts and languages. We will be joined by 11 calligraphers around the world, brought to our performance by Zoom link and projected on a large screen above the altar of the chapel. Visitors to the Godelieve Chapel will see calligraphers writing in Amharic, Arabic, Chinese, Armenian, Cherokee, Hangul, Cyrillic, and other scripts. Our fellow calligraphers on Zoom will include two scribes live in Ukraine, as well as good friends in India, Japan, the US, the UK, Italy, Israel, and Estonia.

This is the first “Brush with Silence” with a live, international stream. You will be able to follow this beautiful, peaceful, and profoundly meaningful event on YouTube. The link can be found at www.brushwithsilence.com.

We will ask visitors to contribute to a fund to help Ukrainian refugees in Bruges. You can donate at www.brushwithsilence.com if you wish. Whatever you decide, please do join us on the livestream this coming Saturday. You will see that peace is possible, respect is possible, and the beauty of silence is possible.

A BRUSH WITH SILENCE

Godelieve Chapel, Boeveriestraat, Bruges

Saturday, May 7, 2022, from 18:00 to 21:00, Brussels time

WRITING IN BRUGES

Veerle Missiaen                                Amharic

Goedele Soetewey                            Copperplate

Emad Ayfan                                      Arabic

Arevik d’Or                                       Armenian

Jurgen Vercaemst                           Journalling

Myriam Lievens                              Cherokee

Maggie Wang                                   Chinese

An Vanhentenrijk                           Cyrillic

Veronique Vandevoorde                Code

Jan De Smedt                                   Gothic

Joon Young                                         Hangul

Carlos González González               Spanish Rotunda

Brody Neuenschwander                  Greek

Kristof Vanhoorne                            Tifinagh

Yves Leterme                                     Cancellaresca

WRITING AROUND THE WORLD

Nikheel Aphale                                  Devanagri                                        India

Oleksiy Chekal                                   Cyrillic                                              Ukraine

Keiko Shimoda                                  Hiragana                                           Japan

Hiral Bhagat                                      Gujarati                                             India

Sveta Sukhova                                   Cyrillic                                              Ukraine

Tatiana Iakovleva                             Cyrillic                                                Estonia

Izzy Pludwinski                                 Hebrew                                              Israel

Tashi Maddox                                    Tibetan                                              UK

Karen Ness                                          Ancient Hebrew                              USA

Shizuka Toyama                                Hiragana                                           USA

Sveta Sukhova                                    Ukrainian Skoropys                       Ukraine

Barbara Calzolari                               Copperplate                                    Italy

Dear Friends, Students and Fellow Calligraphers,

Join me on Monday, 28 February at 8:00pm Brussels time for a free Zoom session on “Fusion Letters.” I’ll demonstrate live how I combine Gothic, Trajan, Kufic and just about everything else to make lively, dancing, playful calligraphy in color. I’ll use a pointed brush and perhaps a couple of pens to make a finished piece. Step by step you’ll see the Wrong Letters grow. You’ll have the chance to ask questions in the chat. Amity Parks will be our monitor. We’ll have a great time together, so join us on Monday! The session will last about an hour.

Join at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85436256640?pwd=V3RmNzdOVHBnQkR3bE5XZWM1bTlHdz09 –> Password: fusion