Pen and Ink
I live with technology and I like it. Mobile phone. PDA. iBook. Don’t know if they’re time savers or time wasters, but I enjoy them all the same. However…
There are those times when nothing other than pen and ink will do. I love the feel of a good pen in hand-with the obligatory good cappuccino in the other, mind you! Using pen and ink is a great way to slow the pace of life. Oh sure, there are those times when I want to crank out information….data, you know……and so email is the obvious choice. And yet, there are those times when the slower pace of putting ink on paper is necessary, so that the ruminating ideas can emerge rather than dash hurriedly across the page. Perhaps a consequence of reading too many Jane Austen novels!
A recent excursion took Daughter-Kate and myself to the National Gallery of Ireland. Frankly, I’m not too adept at the art-of-art-appreciation. After a brief walkabout to view the touring Turner Watercolour exhibition-which I’m sure I neither understood nor appreciated-we stopped in the gallery shop. Yum! What a lovely selection of notecards and stationery. I’m not a paper snob, but I surely do appreciate pleasing-to-the-eye-paper!
Perhaps she will grow up with an appreciation for art.
Perhaps because I have taken her to the art gallery.
Perhaps because she understands art.
Perhaps she can explain it to me some day!
I haven’t used a fountain pen since I was in Germany. And, really, for a leftie, that’s okay. I like the way my handwriting looks for the 2 seconds between getting written my hand dragging through it.
Anymore, though, I don’t even know what my handwriting looks like. I type faster than I write. Hell, I type faster than I think. Last year, I was at the grocery store, paying for my food with a check card, and when I signed the receipt, I used my right hand. I’m left-handed.
I moved to Canada 5 months ago, and when I sign receipts up here, a lot of the cashiers keep my card to check the signature on the back to the one on the receipt. Nobody’s said anything yet, but I’m quite certain that none of it matches.
Awesome that your daughter enjoys the art gallery so much.
25 Jan 2007 at 5:16 am
we have succumbed to the keyboard…writing, penmanship, calligraphy, even printing has become an artform…paper is known as computer paper, we now have exotic and designer paper, who is old enough to remember newsprint paper?
25 Jan 2007 at 6:38 pm