About Barbara

I grew up in a household full of words and images and art. My father worked in advertising in Chicago, my mother was a driving force in local arts organizations in the suburbs. There was a lot of communication going on all the time. Perhaps communication binds this story altogether.

I recall being fascinated by the act of writing before I even knew how to make letters. Here I am holding a crayon.

After a checkered college career, and some far flung travel, I dropped into a renaissance of book arts in the Bay Area in the 1970s. I went looking for a calligraphy teacher and found Georgianna Greenwood. Georgianna approached this art form, and her life, with a fierce curiosity, determination, and vulnerability. I loved her for that.

In her calligraphy classes I learned the scripts of Rome, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I practiced the wide variety of shapes and pen angles and the rhythm of each script. Some were full, generous and clear, others condensed, wild and illegible.

Working out of a storefront studio in Berkeley I created calligraphic flyers, brochures, invitations and signage, taking on pretty much anything that came through the door. I collaborated with letterpress printers and bookbinders on limited edition books. I was part of an alive Bay Area book arts world.

Georgianna brought me up to Oregon to meet Lloyd Reynolds at a gathering of calligraphers in a retreat center outside of Portland. Lloyd was a dynamic professor at Reed College who had enlivened the calligraphic arts in America. He taught calligraphy through the wide view of world culture, describing scripts as expressions of their time the way handwriting can be a reflection of a person’s state of mind.

This deeper view of writing led me to explore the origins of the alphabet. In ancient Sumeria early writing drew from forms of the natural world, parts of the body, tools and creatures. These shapes were passed along through Egyptian, Semitic, Etruscan and Greek scribes, changing, turning, simplifying, and landing in Rome to be carved in stone.

I explored these interweaving alphabetic threads, and have shared the journey in interactive demonstrations, filling large sheets of paper with the narrative of these evolving shapes. Watch the video - Leaping Letters : from Nature to Pictograms to the Alphabet for more about this.

In 1979 I moved to Colorado to join a community of artists and seekers in Boulder studying with the Tibetan meditation teacher Chögyam Trungpa. 

I began teaching western pen calligraphy at Naropa Institute (later University). At one pointI asked Trungpa if it was appropriate to be teaching a western art form at a Buddhist college and he replied, “You start with your own tradition, go deep with that, and it will lead you to everything.”

I created a Book Arts program at Naropa with the writer Susan Edwards, offering the art and craft of the handmade book as an interplay of verbal expression and visual form, as well as the hermetic tradition and the contemplative path.  Over the next eight years I collaborated with dancers, musicians and storytellers . Jerry Granelli invited me into his jazz improvisation classes to make brushstrokes for his students to “play”. I began to paint in performance. I mapped ancient Sumerian stories as Susan Edwards discoursed on their meaning.  My precise nature was stretched by these collaborations. I had to work so large and fast I couldn’t “see” what was happening. I had to I feel my way along with a different kind of knowing.

My travel sketchbooks became another alive practice of responding to the world with immediacy and getting in visual conversation with what was happening around me.

The Heaven, Earth and Human principles guided me into three-line calligraphic expressions and three-part journaling that combined words and images on the page. This was the contemplative practice I offered in drawing workshops, lecture demonstrations and group celebrations,  bringing insight to the moment, listening to what wants to be known, letting the world mirror who we are, and making that visible. As I had done at the Authentic Leadership conferences (see Ending Strokes) I continued to work in new ways as a calligraphic channel.