It has secretly been a long held desire of mine to visit this hallowed ground of letter cutters. For a few years, I had a stone masonry business of my own, where I learned not only the hefty art of lime rendering but also the fine art of letter cutting. Letters Slate Cut, one of Kindersley’s publications, was a great inspiration as I was learning and I used to drive past their workshop holding my breath, like someone passing the house of their favourite movie star.
Beautifully cut stones of all kinds
It was an overcast day but the workshop was bright, not only with daylight but with cleverly sited electric lighting. All around the walls and on every available worktop and shelf there were beautifully cut stones of all kinds, with many different fonts and inspiring words. In this place are held decades of lovingly crafted work, a tribute to the skill and care of generations of crafts people who not only produce some of the best letter cutting in the world, but remain grounded and humble.
Lida was busy taking calls and then she had to spend some time with a sculptor who was making a clay likeness of Lida’s head. We chatted to her sons and after a little while Lida arrived completely unflustered, and calmly apologised for keeping us waiting. Then she settled herself in front of the huge piece of Portland stone and began to talk us through the composition and placement of the letters for the new Blake headstone.
Lines from William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion’
Photograph: James Murray-White © 2018
It was a joy to chat with her while she drew on the words, rubbed them off, drew them on again, rubbed them off again, put them on again, brandishing her specially cut pencils like magic wands. I was deeply gratified to see that she worked in exactly the same way as I did, writing and erasing, moving the words up, moving them down, erasing the whole lot and starting again. It gave me such a thrill to realise that I had been creating in exactly the same way as this highly skilled artist, but had thought myself incompetent because of all the erasing and re-drawing.
Where work takes as long as it takes
At break time everyone in the building stopped and met around a large refectory style wooden table where drinks had been prepared to everyone’s direction and a tin of biscuits was passed round. Amid plenty of convivial conversation and laughter, some of us tackled the Telegraph crossword and after half an hour, without a bell ringing or a word spoken, the company broke up to continue work. It was like a well oiled, well maintained machine that could run and run because nothing was over worked or stressed but all worked together like a beautiful clock.
In the highly stressed, highly mechanised world we live in, it is a delight to visit crafts people and artists like this, where work takes as long as it takes and people are allowed as much time as is necessary to do their work to their highest potential. Without a doubt William Blake would have loved this place.
Since our visit, Lida has moved on to the cutting of the letters — a truly significant moment for the project of bringing William Blake’s new headstone to creation, and one which Finding Blake has been proud to document in these photos — with video footage to follow.
Photograph: James Murray-White © 2018
Notes
Linda Richardson is an artist. Based in Cambridge, England, she makes work that engages the imagination and intuition and tries to make a creative space for the viewer to connect their inner nature with their outer nature to form ideas that are not rooted in convention, reason or rationality. However neither are they pure fantasy that provides and escape from humdrum life. Linda wants instead to awaken the senses to the beauty and wonder of the world in which we live, to activate the attention to the mystery of the human experience.
In a later post — coming soon — James Murray-White will summarise the whole process whereby Lida is creating the new headstone for William Blake, with further posts looking in more detail at some of the main steps.
You can find out more about the Cardozo Kindersley workshop in Cambridge at their website, and the publication Linda that mentioned: Letters Slate Cut – workshop philosophy and practice in the making of letters.
There is a series of readings of the full text of Blake’s Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion on YouTube — part of a series of readings to be found in the Blake Society’s Voice pages, although this one was missing at the time of writing. As always, Wikipedia has an informative page on this book, “the last, longest and greatest in scope of the prophetic books written and illustrated by the English poet, artist and engraver William Blake,” which is not connected with Blake’s more famous poem Jerusalem.