![]() ![]() “It is, just as much as egyptiennes and grotesques are, exclusively built from geometric basic shapes, namely three: a square, a triangle as its half and a quarter circle with a radius equal to a side of the square. Similar to his colleagues Herbert Bayer and Joost Schmidt, Albers constructed letters using compass and ruler on a millimeter grid. Following the typification of “Schrift” 3 based on a formal as well as materialistic economy, Josef Albers, a young teacher at the Dessau Bauhaus, developed a new alphabet in the mid-twenties: Schablonenschrift ( Schablone, German for stencil). The adaptation of the stencil look to movable type overtook the act of stenciling, but it preserved its characteristic design. While this article focuses on stencils as lettering and type in some periods of the twentieth century, I recommend reading Kindel’s catalogue text for a more in-depth historical overview, which can be found on the museum’s website. Eric Kindel suggests: “While stenciling letters itself is self-evidently neither writing nor typography, the work often reaches in these directions” 2 – giving an exhibition curated by Kindel and Smeijers its name: Between Writing & Type: The Stencil Letter, held at Catapult in Antwerp in 2012. The many processes, in which stenciling can be used, make it rather difficult to determine this act of lettering. Reusable stencils made from brass with interlocking edges to connect letters (1/2" cap height), produced by C. While stencils can be moved one by one, creating a letter at a time, some stencils feature the ability to be connected at the side bearings, creating words or sentences in one piece. The stencils itself can be produced from a variety of materials. In historic examples the gaps have simply been filled with ink in a second step, although this feature lends stencil letters their characteristic appearance. To retain a stencil letter in all its counter forms it is necessary to interrupt the strokes, creating so-called bridges and thus connecting all negative space on the plate like a peninsula. 9 published a detailed review of the technology used in the seventeenth century titled A reconstruction of stenciling based on the description by Gilles Filleau des Billettes by Eric Kindel (with two appendices by Fred Smeijers).Īpparently one of the first technical improvements was the ability to control the alignment of letters as well as letter spacing. According to Eric Kindel, who is perhaps the expert on stencils and has done intensive research on several aspects of this subject, a systematic use of stencil letters first began in the middle of the seventeenth century, probably in France, used for composing chant text in liturgical books. Stencil plates can usually be connected on the side bearings to guarantee some sort of horizontal alignment of a string of words. Stenciling letters is a technique used to reproduce the same characters rapidly. Similarly, through exposure of light, Lucia and László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray produced their so-called “photograms” or rather “rayographs” respectively in the first half of the twentieth century. In the famous Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands) in the Santa Cruz region in Argentina cave dwellers spray-painted silhouettes of their own hands on cave walls, therefore creating negative shapes. People more or less used this technique in reversed form over 9,000 years ago. The term stencil describes both the pattern and the image that result from it. Whatever shapes are trimmed away from that plate (using a knife, mortising machine, laser, etc.) will be showcased. The essential idea of stencils is to repeatedly display an image by applying ink or paint on a plate.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |