About the museum

Welcome to the Museum of Calligraphy.  Who are you?  That sounded a bit interrogative!  Are you an artist?  Or an appreciator?  Really, all are welcome.  Calligraphy, like music or dance, is a performance art.  Some say that it is the final station in the progress of a martial artist.  It embodies reflection, physical control, and reactionary elan.  This museum seeks to house the shed skins of so many calligraphic snakes.  In a way, the artifact is ancillary to the act.  In a way, it is the making that has the meaning.  But isn’t this life?  Ah…but then the experience of a museum is its own kind of making.  Whatever way you make, please make.  Because we are minor makers.  We make, we make, we make.  Until we split, we split, we split.  Eventually, the page will no longer be necessary.  Calligraphy is physical and philosophical.  May this museum offer some segments along that arc. 

About the portfolio

Spurgeon is a permanent portfolio begun in 2019 by the calligrapher Kevin Brown, a westerner who found himself living in Taiwan.  More on the calligrapher below.  As for the portfolio, Spurgeon is the latest portfolio in a 20-year practice…a practice that began on a rooftop in Taipei.  This portfolio is being conducted on the beautiful travertine floors of a third-floor apartment in Southern California.  Dappled sunlight flits across the screens that cover the enormous sliding glass doors that look out over Spurgeon Street.  White Jacket, the first album in the portfolio, is an homage to Melville’s classic work…in it, the calligrapher paints the inside of a white duvet and then emerges.  There is all kind of rebirth symbolism at play and a revisitation of the first work from the Norton Studio, Jumping through Hoops. The Mobius series continue the original Mobius from the Norton Studio, but with a twist.  (Pun intended 😉)  The pages are larger and it is a brush that breaks the dimensional barrier.  The Milwaukee Series uses a cordless drill rig with two brushes to intermediate between the maker and the made.  And the Opus Magnus is a work using the found brush of a giant frond to create a glyph that at first reads as the word for middle in Chinese but is actually missing the throughline across the square…is the square a window?  An eye?  Is it the sequence of the numbers 1, 0, and 1?  Is it something else entirely?  Feel free to interpret.  

About the artist

Kevin Brown is the calligrapher.  He didn’t intend to become one.  He never studied it and he can’t write Chinese characters.  Nor was he a martial artist.  Life was his school.  Adventure, his teacher.  Taiwan, his page.  He became a calligrapher as a logical continuation of a multi-decade fascination with writing.  There was fiction, poetry and criticism.  There was pole-vaulting.  And there was an outsider’s view of the athleticism of the culture.  And then, there was the necessity to enter the ring.  To work.  Physically.  Meaningfully.