Barbara Yale-Read: Illuminated

By Caroline Monday

Barbara Yale-Read takes the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” literally. As a calligrapher and graphic designer, she combines words and images to tell a message that is greater than the two could have told individually.

BarbaraYale-Read incorporates the ancient art of hand writing with modern techniques of graphic design to create pieces of art. Photo by Marie Freeman

Yale-Read got her start in art as a child. “I had art all through elementary school and high school and I knew I was interested in it. You know, everyone always said I was going to be an artist,” she said. She used her interest in art to earn a bachelors degree in art eduction at Towson University in Baltimore and went on to teach art at a junior high.

She said she stopped teaching when her second daughter was born, but returned to work when her mother became ill with colin cancer. She went to work with her father at his doctor’s office, which gave her the opportunity to simultaneously take care of her mother. One day a women came into the office and payed with a check. “She had a calligraphy pen,” Yale-Read said, “and I was like, ‘I have to have one of those, I have to do that.’”

She said calligraphy became an “all-consuming passion” for her. She taught herself and attended workshops to learn her craft. “I would sit in bed at night with a drawing board and a fountain pen practicing my letters,” Yale-Read said.

As it turns out, an interest in lettering is something that was first introduced to Yale-Read by her grandfather, who died when she was seven years old.

“He used to do people’s names in their Bibles and he was very interested in lettering,” she said. “He used to buy me a Little Golden Book every Thursday when my mother went grocery shopping. He would bring it home and he would put my name in it and sometimes he would do a big illuminated B for Barbara.”

When she went back to school to get her masters degree, Yale-Read used her interest in calligraphy as the focus of her masters work, studying different styles of illumination.

With the days of hand-copied manuscripts long behind us, one might think handwriting is a lost art, but Yale-Read says it is not. “I think that it’s become an art form because of the fact that it’s almost obsolete,” she said. “Most kids don’t even get a good handwriting study in school. I think the fact that people don’t do it as carefully as they used to means they appreciate it more as an art form.”

Yale-Read incorporates the ancient art of hand writing with modern techniques of graphic design to create pieces of art. She said she finds the two go together well, as hand lettering is the forerunner of typography. “It’s a logical extension,” Yale-Read said, “when I’m teaching typography I have my students do hand lettering for about three weeks at the beginning of semester to acquaint them with the letter forms, which they think they already know.”

Yale-Read said this exercise helps students understand the link between lettering of the past and present, and how styles developed. She said there is a strong connection between the overall trends of a particular time period and its style of lettering. For example, the Romanesque style in architecture, with it’s round Roman arches, was mimicked in lettering styles. When the gothic style became more popular, buildings and letters became tall and skinny. Even in modern history, simplistic sans serif fonts echo minimalist modern architecture.

Yale-Read mixes the old with the new, using techniques ranging from those used in medieval manuscripts to those using digital technology.

In her art work, Yale-Read works to convey a message that is deeper than what the words alone can convey. She often uses poems, song lyrics and other pieces of writing as inspiration and layers several different letterings. “There are layers and you can kind of pick up some things, so it’s like listening to conversations where you’re catching a little bit of this,” she said. “To me it does have a strong analogy with either singing or with something that’s spoken and where you’re not catching everything that is being said.”