Debra Ferreboeuf

For Debra Ferreboeuf, calligraphy became more than just a means to express and illustrate elegant prose and quotes.

“Anything you can create, you do it for your own pleasure and satisfaction,” the Sea Scribes Monterey Bay Calligraphy Guild founder explains. “That’s what I got out of it, and I just loved doing it.”

More than anything, though, it is the sort of person that the craft tends to attract that hooked her. The sort of person that pines for more than just the beauty within the letters: “I’ve never seen a more congenial and thoughtful group than calligraphers.”

Ferreboeuf first got into calligraphy by taking classes through the Eugene, Oregon, recreation department, and began teaching her own when she moved to Tahoe, where none existed.

“What you learn as teacher is that there are others out there who are into calligraphy. And soon you have a whole community of calligraphers,” Ferreboeuf says. It’s a fact that continued to prove true when she and a band of local calligraphers started Sea Scribes in 1988 – a move inspired by the guild Ferreboeuf joined in Eugene. “I really missed the camaraderie of fellow calligraphers.” Ferreboeuf describes those early days as being a time of youth and vigor: “We had a lot of energy, and we kept finding more and more people who knew calligraphy.”

The Weekly caught up with Ferreboeuf, who’s now been doing calligraphy for more than 40 years, to discuss the local calligraphy group and where the old art form now stands.

Weekly: How you would describe what the art of calligraphy is?

Ferreboeuf: Literally it translates from the Greek “calli” and “graphos” to “beautiful letters.” But it means so much more now, because you can take lettering and incorporate it into many different art mediums. You can use acrylic ink on canvas and fabric. You can use it on tile and pottery. And sometimes the lettering is not even legible. It’s just a kind of a feeling of what the calligrapher is trying to convey. It’s a little bit like abstract painting in that sense. You can’t read it, but once you are given the meaning behind it, you start to get a idea of what feeling you get. Its like fine art in that sense too. But the one difference between calligraphy and fine art is that there is a craft to calligraphy, because letter forms, historically, are made in a particular way. We all do handwriting, but there are standards.

You can tell when someone is not trained because their letter forms don’t have the structures letter forms are supposed to have.

What sort of challenges did you come across during Sea Scribes’ early days as a group?

In this age of instant gratification, to learn something new everyone thinks, “Why can’t I learn calligraphy in a day?” To learn italics, it’s going to take three to four years. You need to grow with it. You need to be comfortable with it. It’s like learning the piano: You can’t play Beethoven overnight.

Speaking of being in the age of instant gratification, there is talk that technology has rendered handwriting irrelevant. Are you concerned that calligraphy is at risk of disappearing?

Calligraphy is different. There is a big difference, though most people equate the two. When I say I am a calligrapher a lot of people will tell me, “My handwriting is just terrible.” Well, mine isn’t so great, either.

When personal computers came onto the scene with all the fonts, everyone thought, “I can do calligraphy myself.” But once the novelty of that all wore off, it was just a machine-made font. And all of a sudden, what I did became more valuable. After that, people really appreciated hand-done things. What I and other calligraphers do is something more rare now.

What is there to be lost if calligraphy were to disappear?

It disappeared for a while, and it had to be rediscovered again. It’s been lost before, so I don’t know. It’s like asking what would happen if we lost art and culture. What if we lost design? What if we lose architecture?

SEA SCRIBES MONTEREY BAY CALLIGRAPHY GUILD gathers at 7pm on the first Thursday of each month (except July and August). See facebook.com/seascribes for meeting locations. General information about the group can be found at seascribes.org