Just my type
You can see the beach as a tanning bed, or you can see it as a blank canvas for art. By Shanthini Naidoo
OF course a lover of fonts would sign his name “&rew”. The curly ampersand is a favourite of calligrapher Andrew van der Merwe, who takes lettering to another level, right off the page.
Van der Merwe, 49, draws pretty patterns and fanciful lettering in the sand, intricate designs that look like messages from medieval giants. He is one of the country’s few land artists, a beach calligrapher.
He says his appreciation of fonts, in a time of graphics and typesetting, began in childhood. “My Grade 1 teacher was a very beautiful woman with long brown hair who gave me gold stars for my first writing lessons. I also still have vivid memories of the feeling of the pencil on the paper.”
Calligraphy is his profession. He creates signage, branding and labels such as those for Penny C clothing, Bean There coffee merchants, Melissa’s foods, and a wine label for Bruce Jack.
He also pens scrolls for the city fathers of Cape Town, where he lives. “It would be tasteless to typeset very special documents such as the Nobel prizes or the freedom of the city, like the ones we did for Nelson Mandela and for Barack and Michelle Obama.”
The beach calligraphy, a pastime turned art form, is something special. At low tide, he dons paddlelike, non-marking wooden shoes, carries his handmade tools to the beach and gets to work creating patterns which seem alien, foreign, but always beautiful. They will be gone with the high tide, or the next wave.
“I have seen work last a couple of weeks if done in wet sand above the high tide, but the whole beauty of it is its temporal quality. It is often at its most beautiful when it is being eroded by the water or the wind.”
The patterns are asemic: a freeform, wordless way of writing and drawing. “The more angular letter styles take their inspiration from tifinagh, the script of the Tuareg people of North Africa which resembles ancient Greek and Phoenician. The more complex-looking characters are usually from the Adinkra symbols of the Akan people of Ghana and Ivory Coast.”
But, he says, “they’re mostly meaningless doodles”.
He started beach art unconsciously, like many of us do, making scratches in the sand while walking on the beach. “I am a keen surfer and time spent on the beach inevitably led to writing and markmaking. I began shaping the points of sticks to get special effects and that led to more and more sophisticated tools.”
The artworks often draw a crowd. “People have seldom seen anything like it. Sometimes I struggle to get a piece done because everyone is so curious. But then sometimes people walk over it without noticing, or come up to me and ask what I’m trying to catch!”
Romantics sometimes commission him to scribe their names in a heart.
Van der Merwe made his mark around the world after a 2004 “decade of democracy” project gained momentum. “The idea was to celebrate the new South Africa by writing lekker South Africanisms all over the beach — words like eish, gandaganda, gatvol and kakistocracy .”
Ten years later, his beach calligraphy has appeared in publications worldwide. “I’ve had my work published in the Huffington Post in the US, La Repubblica in Italy, Designed Building in China and three of the world’s top calligraphy journals.”
Van der Merwe studied philosophy at the University of Cape Town but freelanced as a calligrapher, improving over the years and eventually calling it his career.
“Calligraphy is easy to understand, not so easy to do. Like playing a musical instrument, you fine- tune it through years of practice. It is the skill and personal quality of hand writing that sets it apart from typesetting. Essentially, type is a form of mass production.”
The self-taught Van der Merwe believes he is one of two professional calligraphers in South Africa.
“The other is Hilary Adams. There’s also a handful of calligraphy teachers, a few guilds and numerous enthusiastic amateurs. In a way, we are a dying breed, in another way quite the opposite.
“We no longer find calligraphers in scriptoriums writing books and documents by hand. Very little signage is done by hand and even those inspirational quotes that do the rounds on the internet tend to be typeset, so calligraphy as a commercial craft is on the way out.
“But some services will always remain. If you want something special, there is nothing to match the human hand.” LS • Go to behance.net/beachscriber for more images