THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509020141
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JO-ANN CLEGG, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
Most people think of a calligrapher, if they think of one at all, as someone who has taken a couple of courses in how to make fancy letters, owns a set of strange pens and is on call to address invitations to parties, weddings and bar mitzvahs.
But then most people haven't met a talented, highly trained lettering artist such as Leana Fay.
The Fairfield resident, who holds a bachelor of fine arts degree from the respected Rhode Island School of Design, was one of the 50 best calligraphy instructors from around the world chosen to teach at the recent LETTERFORUM '95, the 15th international conference of Lettering Artists.
Although the literal translation of the word calligraphy is beautiful handwriting, the serious group of artists of which Fay is a part go far beyond producing pretty print.
``We don't just deal with beautiful handwriting,'' Fay said. ``We deal with the structuring of positive and negative space. It's a very structured art form.''
As practiced by Fay, whose works hang in galleries, schools, churches, businesses and private homes both here and abroad, it is also very beautiful.
Working out of a large, crowded studio over the garage of her home (``My husband says if I add one more thing up here we'll have to have another steel beam to support it,'' she says with a laugh), she creates the sometimes whimsical, always exquisite paintings into which she integrates her own style of beautiful handwriting.
For many years now her works have had a strong religious theme. Starting with a biblical text, she creates the work of art which illustrates the message.
In one of her works, created for a friend who was going through a difficult time, text from Jeremiah concerning God's plan appears on a background of blues and purples. The words ``Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find'' from the Sermon on the Mount form a three-sided frame around the picture.
The work is both powerful and beautiful, enough so that when Fay entered it in a Sacred Arts show at the Billy Graham Museum in Wheaton, Ill., it was purchased by the museum as part of its permanent collection.
Religious art was not what Fay had planned as her life's work when she graduated from college and married her husband, Peter, a now-retired Air Force officer.
As they moved from duty station to duty station she did some teaching, took courses, did a few portraits and raised her daughter, Leslie, and son, David.
The inspiration for serious work did not come in those early days. ``I realized later when I met the Lord that it was because I had nothing to say before. He's given me the message.''
These days the words of the Lord come to her mind first, followed by the inspiration for the painting to illustrate it. Then comes the trial and error phase of marrying the two. That process is made much less tedious these days with the help of a state of the art Macintosh computer.
``It's wonderful. I can scan my work in, enlarge it, reduce it, move it around, try all sorts of things,'' Fay said. The finished product, however, is always the result of Fay's creative mind and meticulous handwork.
Recently she and Peter have joined in a family business venture to market her work more widely.
At the moment their comfortable home, which once had plenty of space for the family of four, is filled with the trappings of an artist who takes her work to the public: huge rolls of bubble wrap, brown paper, twine, tape, empty frames and a variety of mats.
In one of her first outings, Fay will take her religious prints and copies, highlighted by the work of the serious calligrapher, to the upcoming Christian Coalition conference in Washington. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by JO-ANN CLEGG
``We don't just deal with beautiful handwriting,'' artist Leana Fay
says. ``We deal with the structuring of positive and negative
space.''
by CNB