About
My pattern of life has evolved through many different shapes which you can explore through the timeline below. Today I have my own calligraphy studio in Brighton, UK. I hold a part-time post as Professor in Design at The University of Sunderland. I am a core faculty member of the Royal School of Drawing in London. I have also trained as a somatic coach with the Strozzi Institute in California... and right now, I am learning Spanish!
“In October 2022 Ewan was asked by the Queen Consort to design her Royal Cypher. As the crown needed approval from Garter King of Arms, Ewan collaborated with the heraldic painter Tim Noad on that element. This is Tim’s final painting of the full design.
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“The studio reopens to students after Covid. Here we see students on the three month course joining a special gilding workshop with a visiting tutor Helen White.”
“‘Writing: Making Your Mark’ opens at the British Library, an exhibition about the future of writing looking at hieroglyphs to emojis, encompassing 5000 years of history and looking at over 44 writing systems. I act as the external academic advisor to the exhibition and catalogue editor and author.
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“Begin teaching a three month long course in my studio on the Foundations of Calligraphy.”
“I qualify as a Somatic Coach. My certificate, with the well thumbed book by Richard Strozzi Heckler that started it all for me back in the 1990s.”
“Take on the tenancy of my studio at 14 Sillwood Road. The course at Kensington Palace has closed but this gives me a new space in which to work and teach.”
“Publication of the Spanish translation of The Golden Thread by Siruela. Interview in El Pais Semanal.”
“Received an M.B.E. for services to calligraphy and heritage crafts from the United Kingdom. Photo: My father Ian, myself, and my brother Alistair.”
“Received the first Karlgeorg Hoefer award for role in teaching calligraphy internationally, from the Schreibwerkstatt Klingspor, Offenbach, Germany.
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“Publication of the Italian translation of The Golden Thread by Bollati Boringhieri.
Interview with La Repubblica.
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“Publication of The Golden Thread, Atlantic Books. My aim was to write a popular history of the Roman Alphabet across different media. Four page feature in The Financial Times.
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“Established a Foundation degree in Calligraphy and Design, a collaboration between the University of Sunderland and the Royal Drawing School at Kensington Palace, London.
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“2006 saw the centenary of the publication Edward Johnston’s handbook ‘Writing, Illuminating, & Lettering’. I curated the commemorative exhibition at Ditchling Museum. The catalogue was sponsored by The University of Brighton. A poster exhibition of this show toured several Latin American countries (Johnston was born in Uruguay). The link here is to a talk I subsequently gave for the Letterform Archive about Johnston at The San Francisco Public Library in 2016
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“In 2000 I was appointed Visiting Professor in Design at The University of Sunderland, joining the salaried staff in 2006. With Manny Ling we initiate a Calligraphy Research Centre there. Our Monkwearmouth campus in next door to St Peter’s Church the site of the monastery that Bede entered as a child. The doorway there dates from its foundation in 684.”
“In the late 1990s we (Gerry Fleuss, Patricia Gidney and I) established the Edward Johnston Foundation. Working with Ditchling Museum we won a lottery grant for a three year programme of events, exhibitions and publications at the Museum which was the beginning of its subsequent regeneration.”
“My first of many visits to Japan to teach calligraphy. By happy coincidence some of my grandfather’s work was touring in an exhibition ‘The English Arts and Crafts Movement and Hamada Shoji’. I visited Hamada’s compound and it was at this time that I also met Nao Sakamoto for the first time. His shop ‘Paper Nao’ in Tokyo is one of the main sources for the paper I now use.
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“In 1996 I wrote a short essay about my approach to calligraphy ‘The Calligraphy of the Heart’. I had become much more aware of the body and the process of writing rather than simply looking at the end results. The booklet was issued with three posters, and production masterminded by Rick Valicenti for Gilbert Papers Inc. in the USA. The image is of a reprint being rebound in my studio a year ago. It is also published in Italian by Associazione Calligrafica Italiana .
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“I curated my first exhibition, Codes and Messages, an exhibition about contemporary calligraphy and lettering for the Crafts Council.”
“Tide in, tide out, St. Cuthbert’s Island off Holy Island, Northumberland. From 1989 onwards I helped lead annual calligraphy retreats on the island of Lindisfarne with my friend Rev. Robert Cooper.
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“Robert Copper and I produced a book together ‘Embracing Change: Spirituality and the Lindisfarne Gospels’.”
“I was invited to become a consultant for Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre. It was quite a culture shock! For the next 12 years I spent parts of the summer each year in Silicon Valley as part of a laboratory thinking about the future of documents. I learned most from the anthropologists I met there who helped shape my interests in how we use documents to give order to our daily lives and opened my eyes to the ways in which human knowledge is co-constructed.Read interviews about this time here and here.
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“In 1984, after recovering from a serious illness, I decided to explore what I had long dismissed as just a crazy idea. I joined a monastic community being clothed as a novice in 1985 and then leaving the community of Worth Abbey in 1988. It remains a formative part of my life and I continue to feel part of Worth’s extended community.”
“In the early 1980s the calligrapher Irene Wellington introduced me to Julian Brown, Professor of Paleography at King’s College, London. He invited me to sit in on all his lectures and seminars as a ‘resident’ calligrapher to be questioned on the practicalities of penmanship, Irene had fulfilled this role in the past. I learned a huge amount from him not least from the essential humility and humanity he brought to his scholarship.”
“In 1979-80 I studied for a Diploma in Calligraphy and Bookbinding at the Roehampton Institute with Ann Camp, a year later I won a Craft Fellowship from the Crafts Council and began to work as Ann’s assistant. This piece, a history of writing, was my final major project.”
“The Castle, May morning, St. Andrews, Scotland. From 1975 I studied at the University of St. Andrews graduating with a Joint Honours MA in Medieval History and Psychology. My history Tutor for the last two years was Prof Donald Bullough, at that time the main English speaking expert on the Carolingian period, I have loved that moment in history ever since.”
“My godmother, Joy Sinden, was important to me as I grew up. She was a kind of ‘fairy godmother’ introducing me to exciting new worlds like that of the theatre. She still influences my work. She had been a student of Rudolf Laban, the movement theorist, and passed on to me aspects of his ideas.”
“I grew up in an around a community of people who worked with their hands. My grandfather Valentine KilBride was a silk weaver and dyer at the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, Ditchling Common, Sussex. Later I too became a member of this Guild.”
“Born January 4th 1956, Hassocks, Sussex. Pictured at 9 months old.”