Reed Magazine: The dance of the pen (5/7)

Pens in hand, sometimes artfully, sometimes in trepidation—Reynolds could be ferocious in his criticism—calligraphy students made their marks on the paper, and each tiny step in the dance pushed open a door. “The letterforms allowed those of us who weren’t artists to understand the power of making a beautiful form,” says Jaki Svaren ’50. “But without Lloyd Reynolds’s powerful personality it wouldn’t have gotten off the ground.”

“What I gained from his class,” adds Sumner Stone ’67, “was a clear sense of the magical nature of making letters, and the fact that they are a true link between the mind and the body, between the physical world and the mental world.”

“He respected students,” says graphic designer Georgiana Greenwood ’60, “and he added joy to the skill. Legibility, communication, clarity, and respect for others—all these were tenets in the religion of Lloyd Reynolds and calligraphy. You got as much from who he was as from what he was teaching, and that’s the talent of a great teacher.”

Artist and designer Margot Voorhies Thompson ’70 agrees. “What I remember is that he made me fall in love with the study of calligraphy, and that made me fall in love with the study of everything. It was an incredible invitation to get involved in a life of the mind.”

Quick-tempered as he was quick-witted, Reynolds could also make his calligraphy classes more than a little frightening. “He usually came into class very grumpy,” Michael McPherson ’68 says. “He would begin by chewing everyone out for our pathetic attempts at, well, pretty much everything. Then he would get into the class, and by the end he could barely contain his joy—with the subject matter and with each of us and our potential.”

“He could be incredibly tough,” Thompson says, “but he really cared about people. And the tougher he was on you, the more it meant that he believed in you.”

“One day we were practicing letters,” McPherson recalls, “and Reynolds said loudly to a woman in the class ‘You don’t have an ounce of rhythm in your entire body! You should get out of here, go home, put on some Mozart, dance around for an hour, then try this again.’ She dissolved in tears. I ran into her years later, and she told me that Lloyd felt so bad about it that he had sent her a Christmas card every year since! ‘And the thing is,’ the woman told me, ‘what he said to me was right!’”

Reynolds, even in the most basic footwork for the dance of the pen, seemed to be hiding life lessons. From his instruction book for the calligraphy classes: “The curved part of the flourish is more pleasing if it is full. . . . consider a flourish as a sign of exuberance. But because exuberance can’t be turned on at will, the practicing of flourishes is likely to be an artificial exercise. Since any dance has to be learned, it is to be expected that its movements will be expressive only after considerable practice. Therefore, as always, patience!”