Jake Weidmann’s Calligraphic World: Art of a Master Penman

One of the longest, oldest romances is between the eye and the hand. When I was really young, I had this conviction. If I was going to be an artist, then everything that came from my hand had to be beautiful. Jake's unique. His skill is amongst the highest of any living penman I know of today. I took it upon myself to really work obsessively on my handwriting. Everybody else in school had their laptops out, and they were all typing away, and I had a pen and a pad of paper. Jake was so artistic from early on, he would be the last one to go out to recess because he took so long in writing his sentences, and he was just so very detailed. During the golden age of penmanship, basically from about the Civil War on, penmanship skills were your ticket to success in business. Many people would go to penmanship schools. The typical way that they graduated was creating their own certificate. If it was of the highest quality, they were given the title Master Penman. The tradition of Master Penman is now being kept alive through the International Association of Master Penman and Grocers and Teachers of Handwriting. They're very official. I practice a lot of different art forms, but I particularly mix calligraphy into my artwork to give both the words and the pictures more life and a stronger message. When you look at some of the larger pieces, it is a commitment of months and even a year's worth of time. He would have to be a perfectionist to do that kind of work. Some of that probably came from me. When people tell me, you make it look so easy, I often think like, well, you weren't there when I was up till 4.30 in the morning slaving away at it. People often see the end result. They don't see the struggle that goes into it, maybe with the exception of my wife. I didn't really understand it until we got married, the time that it took to create a piece. A lot of the times he is doing things several times over. He doesn't have a lot of room to mess up, so he will sometimes scrap things completely. It took years and years to become proficient and masterful enough to have that kind of power over the pen. I believe that you should bloom where you are planted. You know, one of the old masters used to say you should study as much as you practice. Looking around, there's always such beauty to study from, the beauty that is really Colorado. I love Colorado and it really guides my hand. He's in the footsteps of some very significant people in American history. Platt Rogers Spencer, who was the creator of American penmanship, took his inspiration from nature. I'm a fifth generation student of Platt Rogers Spencer. Jake is the next generation. We are carrying this baton from one generation to the next. There's so much self-expression in it that it is seen as an art form, but it serves a functional purpose. Thank you so much. We're abdicating so much of what we are learning and retaining, not to our own memories, but to the memories of our computers and other devices. By doing the different tactile movements of forming the individual letters and linking those letters one to another, and then putting those words into a context of a sentence, you're actually ingraining the information in your brain. We're people, we're not machines. Or if the Declaration of Independence was written as an email, how special or personal would that be? If you don't teach your child handwriting, the thoughts that they develop when they wish to communicate through a computer will vanish as soon as they have touched the keyboard. There's a lot of young penmen coming up and that's what I hope to inspire, to get more people involved in this and to fall in love with writing by hand.