Guidelines

This is a page with some thoughts I frequently have when contemplating tattoos, calligraphy, art and anything else I discuss with clients. Unlike the FAQ, which you should definitely take the time to read, most of this page is possibly irrelevant to you. Some of it may actually be helpful and/or insightful.

Uniqueness vs. authenticity

A point at which a lot of my clients get stuck is the search for ultimate uniqueness. The question “but did anyone else ever do this or ever think of this or ever want this or feel this and what does that say about me as a person?” seems to hunt some of us to a point where a productive contemplation of a project sometimes becomes hard to maintain. 

Can I relate to this? I do. Of course. As an artist, I strive to not only avoid copying others but as well to avoid copying myself. In other words: I aim at being unique and innovative at all times. 

That being said, I believe that as a culture we got two concepts mixed up: uniqueness and authenticity. Uniqueness is the idea of being unlike anyone else. Authenticity is the idea of being radically true to yourself. As it is fashionable to assume that as individuals we’re unlike anyone else, authenticity and uniqueness became supposedly interchangeable terms. In a world populated by 7.5 billion people, though, it’s hard to imagine 7.5 billion individuals, each sharing nothing, no tastes or preferences, no fears and no traumata, with any of the other 7.5 billion individuals. Even the mere notion of culture goes against that possibility.

More than that: the expectation to be unique in all possible ways keeps us in an impossible limbo. Just like consumer culture as a whole, it keeps us inherently unsatisfied, constantly striving for the impossible, constantly doubting ourselves and easily manipulated into whatever promises us that inaccessible uniqueness for the right price.

So let’s all focus on authenticity, instead. Whenever you find yourself casting aside an idea because it “has been done”, be kind to yourself, pick up that idea again, look at it and ask yourself “does it express what I feel? Does it echo in my soul?”. If it does, don’t worry about those anonymous millions who may or may not have tattooed the same thing before. If it fits what you feel, if it reflects what we’re trying to express, it’s good. 

Cover ups

Yes, calligraphy cover ups are possible and I often create art for cover ups. That being said, cover ups are challenging. Cover ups demand areas tightly covered with ink. And letters, characteristically, offer a lot of empty space. Just think of the page of a book. 95% of it is white. My challenge is thus to turn those remaining 5% into 100% in order to create a work that will cover up your old tattoo. 

So why do I bother you with my professional concerns? Because it has a huge impact on how you and I would work on a cover up. Working on typical project, David and I ask you for a lot of your preferences. We want every single work to be as personal as possible. With most cover ups, I’ll ask you for a theme and for wording. And some very specific photos of the old tattoo. And then I’ll tell you what’s possible. 

Because of how demanding a project like that is, our scope of action is very limited. I’ll still put every bit of effort into making this work personal and authentically yours. We just may correspond some less about it.

Legibility

When thinking about calligraphy, legibility is often an issue to be considered. After all, letters are primarily something functional. As such, illegible letters fail at what they are supposed to do: conveying a message. That thought makes a lot of sense, and looking at traditional calligraphy, we often find very legible works. 

But then, there is an entire body of works, by great artists, in which legibility seems to play a secondary, if any, role. If we take a look at the works of Hassan Massoudy, you’ll notice that you may be able to read some of his works [if you read Arabic], but legibility seems to not be at the forefront of his concerns when drawing. In the case of El Seed, it seems to be even harder to find specific words in his works. I sometimes wonder if he used specific words in the first place. Looking at Latin letter calligraphy, Nils “Shoe” Meulman would be a perfect example of a calligrapher who will often abandon legibility.

Needless to mention that all three are some of the most influential calligraphers of our time.

So what makes calligraphy artists, people who dedicate their whole life and creativity to letters, abandon the most basic function of these letters?

I believe that more often than not, it is the quest for expression that makes works of calligraphy become less legible than a printed book. 

After all, calligraphy is more than just letters. It is art, using letters as “pixels”. And art wants to be expressive. If we put aside “popular” calligraphy, and focus on the works of people whose quest it is not to simply write beautifully, but rather to create art from letters, we’ll find ourselves confronted with a tension: the tension between legibility on one hand and expression and creativity on the other. Any piece of calligraphy is located somewhere on that line. 

If I draw a tattoo for a person who just went through a rough time and is looking for a touchstone, something to remind them of their strength to overcome this time, to grow stronger and to find peace, and if that person feels that their ancestry, their Jewish history and roots are a ground they can stand on, I may find myself drawing a project with the words Had I not fallen, I would not have arisen. Had I not been subject to darkness, I could not have seen the light, from Micah. I may want to “pour” these words into the form of a phoenix, symbolising the power of renewal within that person. 

Inevitably, I’ll find myself in midst of that above mentioned tension between legibility and expression. On one hand, the most legible form those words can take is exactly the way they are written in a Hebrew bible. Black on white paper, in a straight line. On the other hand, the most detailed and expressive phoenix doesn’t include any of the Hebrew letters. It may be an oil painting with rough strokes and a fiery background.

It is the marriage between the two that makes creative calligraphy possible. And like any marriage, it demands concessions from both parties. 

The letters may have to give up some of their straight lines. Some words may have to be stretched. Connections between words may have to be separated. On the other hand, the imaginary phoenix on oil I mentioned may have to give up on some of the flames it was born from. Some of the feathers may have to make space for the sharp lines of a Lamed or an Aleph. And its wide open eye may have to depicted by a single Yud, leaving a lot for the viewer’s imagination. 

The result is always an abstraction from both the text and the image. A calligram, a depictive calligraphy work, will always be more abstract than the image I had in mind when sharpening my pencil for the first time. And it will always be an abstraction of that straight line of letters we found in the book of Micah.

What we gained in exchange for what we gave up is a depth of a work rich in layers and new connections and references. In a way, we can see it as the synthesis, born of the thesis of the printed sentence and the antithesis of the initially imagined phoenix.

In way of conclusion I’d like to mention that there is no universal sweet spot on that line between legibility and expression/creativity. Each work demands a new assessment of what should be preserved and what can be given up. The only thing that can never happen is a perfectly legible work which at the same time is anything but the pure, naked text.

Timshel

There is hardly any request we receive more than to design a “timshel”. We often refuse politely, explaining that Timshel is not a Hebrew word.

You might think: but Steinbeck! But East of Eden! He definitely didn’t make that one up! Why the hell would he? Frankly - we wonder about the same! So many beautiful Hebrew words, so many Jews in the US to ask about those words, and still, he chose to make up a word. 

Or say: not really “make up”. Rather “interpret freely”. Very freely, as you will see.

The word Timshel, if it existed, would be written out תמשל. Now, as vowels are only rarely written out in Hebrew, that Hebrew word actually reads TMSHL. The vowels, if not added to the letters, will be added when read out loud by a Hebrew speaker according to meaning and context. For a non-Hebrew speaker there’s really no way of knowing how a word would be pronounced. 

There are two Hebrew words that contain those letters: timshol and timashel.

  • Timashel means one of two: you shall be ruled or you shall be compared [in the sense of a comparison in a parable]. So definitely not thou mayest.

  • Timshol means: you shall rule. While that is definitely not thou mayest neither, we assume that Steinbeck read that word, didn’t know how to pronounce it or what it means exactly, and made up its own meaning by interpreting the text, Genesis chapter 4. 

As the passage in Genesis 4 is about overcoming the desire to sin, the word Timshol in this context means: “You will feel the urge to sin. Overcome it! Get a grip on yourself! Don’t do whatever you want in that very moment, but rather think about how moral it is, or what the outcome would be!”.

That is, we think, pretty much the exact opposite of its meaning, according to Rabbi Steinbeck: “[…] the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice […]”

Nope. It doesn’t. Really not. On the contrary. Timshol is a clear order: don’t sin. Be stronger than your desires. Just as the commandment “though shalt not kill” isn’t about the freedom to take someone’s life or not to. It’s a prohibition of murder.

And let’s be honest: in general, free choice is not exactly big in the Old Testament anyway. The whole story is pretty much about clear orders, blind obedience and how those who don’t live up to it get punished by exile, massive floods and an impressive number of other surprisingly creative types of death. 

So by any means: do needle the word “timshel” to your skin. It’s a beautiful reminder of your free will. In some cases, I’ll even draw it for you. Just don’t assume it’s Hebrew or any kind of Bible quote. 

 

Gender and the Hebrew Language

As I create tattoos, many of my clients are progressively minded. A progressive myself, I agree with a lot of liberal, reformist ideas. One of those ideas is that gender is a concept not entirely dictated by nature. In other words: a large part of what is often seen as “natural gender” is, in fact, performative. As such, gender performance isn’t eternal, it is important to question it and we will be freer if we avoid accepting traditional gender roles as fixed, permanent and inevitable. And if there’s anything dear to my heart, it’s freedom. 

And yet, male Hebrew wording for a tattoo on a female body isn’t revolutionary. It’s erroneous and misguided. I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine, with the original male term for beloved is not a tattoo suitable for a heterosexual male person. And no amount of “but gender is oppressive!” will fix this. 

To explain this supposed contradiction between my progressive stance on gender and my seemingly conservative opinion on gender in the Hebrew context, we have to recall that one of the beautiful and terrifying things about languages is that it gives us tools to think - but only certain things and only in certain ways. It silently guides our thought processes. And just like a fish in the water, for which water doesn’t exist, that silent guidance is hardly ever noticeable. 

Ask any multilingual person you may know. Not your friend who took a French class in high school. But that childhood friend who grew up speaking Spanish at home and English on the streets. That coworker who immigrated from one culture to another, adapted perfectly and is now fluent in two languages and cultures. Or even better: a person who speaks three, four, five languages, because they lived in different cultures. If they are truly at home in more than one language, they will tell you how they are slightly different persons in each. 

Or think about great people and their culture. Think about Bach and Wittgenstein. Bach’s music and Wittgenstein’s thoughts would never have been possible without the inherently complex structure of the German language they lived in. But neither could Cortázar or García Márquez ever have been Germans. The German language would have choked the delicacy of their expression.

And so if we compare the “guidance” inherent to Hebrew on one hand and to English on the other, one of the most noticable differences between the two is the importance gender has in each. Everything is gendered in Hebrew. People. Of course. And animals. OK. But as well tables and ideas and relationships and cloud formations. And numbers! There are no gender neutral numbers in Hebrew. Gender is everywhere. Is this cool? It may not be. But it’s a fact. English, on the other hand, is super flexible regarding gender. Even people can sometimes be gender neutral!

A good parallel in the English language may be tenses. Tenses are amazingly specific in English. In Hebrew, you got present, past and future. That’s it. In English, you got all these weird constellations like Future Perfect Progressive. Hardly graspable for a Hebrew speaker! We don’t think in these terms. Quite literally so: a Hebrew speaker will often have a less specific idea of time than an English or a German speaker. 

The same goes for Spanish speakers, but for slightly different reasons: vamos a la playa is significantly more flexible than any sentence you can come up in English. Is this a prompt? A statement regarding a general present? The future? It’s ambiguous. 

So now imagine a person who just starts learning English and regards these very specific tenses as oppressive. It’s not impossible to imagine someone who feels oppressed by the demand of being accurate and let go of flexibility. So they decide to use English tenses very loosely. They will say “yesterday, we will have been going to the beach”. Or “later today I was taking a bath”. Going one step further, after a week of daily classes,  they may choose to dismantle the oppressive structures altogether, saying stuff like “I would been like have to wanted of be eaten an ice cream”. 

Is this a revolutionary act? I hardly think so. It’s a failure to properly use the English language. 

It actually could possibly have been a revolutionary act if performed from within. By someone who is intimate enough with the delicate structures of the English language to estimate the impact of a change like the one described above. But simply copying the expectations of a simple, flexible and unspecific concept of tense from their own language into English, without first gaining a profound understanding of the English language can hardly result in anything but messy mistakes. 

And now to my point: the same goes for gender in Hebrew. I’m not against reforming the deeply traditionalist gender structures of the Hebrew language. On the contrary. But this change will come from within. Assuming that the relative gender flexibility the English language offers its user can simply be pasted into a complex, multi layered structure like a 4000 years old language without causing anything but messy mistakes is ignorant and anglocentric. Simply ignoring the fact that the Biblical beloved has a very clear gender isn’t a progressive act. It’s naive. 

And no, not the sweet kind of naive.