The art of writing: Snohomish calligrapher brings an ancient art to modern artwork

SNOHOMISH — She used to speak with her hands. Now words flow from her pen.

Chelsea Bridges Wagner is a professional calligraphy artist who spent 15 years as a sign language interpreter.

In her Snohomish home studio, she creates invitations, cards and signs using ink and the human touch.

It’s all by hand. No stencil. Usually no pencil.

“I took calligraphy class on a whim and fell in love,” said Wagner, 35.

The lure was the emotion elicited from words in new ways.

“I’ve always been a huge word junkie,” she said. “Vocabulary words are my favorite things and finding out you can write them in different ways following the pen strokes that master penmen from centuries ago were using, it just blew my mind. The amount of detail and perfection that goes into calligraphy is all encompassing.”

“Calligraphy” is derived from Greek meaning “beautiful writing.” The art has thousands of years of history.

She said she melds historical or archived calligraphy with modern phrasing and pops of color. Inspirations include sign painters, medieval manuscripts, and ornamental work from the Victorian era.

A top selling greeting card is of Bigfoot romping through the forest with a party hat and noise maker.

“It’s your big day,” it reads in a script as old as the immortal Sasquatch, but much prettier.

“I’ve been fortunate to study under some of the world’s most celebrated calligraphers,” Wagner said. “It’s crazy what you can do with a pen.”

She doesn’t let her dyslexia get in the way.

“It’s an adventure sometimes,” she said.

“In a piece of text, I will go through the vowels that I usually switch, so every vowel is a different color so I am more visually in tune into what is happening. My husband has a very good set of eyes and proofreads everything.”

She designed a line of about 120 greeting cards that are reproductions of the originals. She wrote a how-to book to go with a calligraphy starter kit she sells.

These days, most kids aren’t taught cursive handwriting.

Cursive is a fast and functional means to connect letters. Calligraphy is slow and fancy. Great handwriting is not a prerequisite, Wagner said, or she’d be ineligible.

“Calligraphy is drawing letters rather than writing them,” she said.

Irregularities are part of the perfection, but have to be perfect.

“I want some irregularities, because otherwise you might as well just use a font, where every letter is the same,” she said. “If this was a font all these lines would be the same thickness, but because this was done with a pen you should be able to see there is variation.”

In the studio with dip pens and inks, one thing was missing.

Where’s the big bottle of white-out correction fluid?

“I use X-acto knives and scrape it off very very gently,” she said.

The scrapes couldn’t save a scroll she spent three days working on for the Boston Bar Association.

“I had finished it all until the last paragraph and in the first line I missed a word and I didn’t have enough space to scrape it so I had to rewrite the whole thing,” she said.

She offers her products online and at venues, such as the Snohomish Farmers Market.

“I work about 100 markets a year, so I’m out a lot,” she said.

Sometimes, she has to translate.

“College students will ask me to read some of the cursive because they can’t read it,” he said.

She likes sharing the old art form. The Bigfoot card and others are $6 on her website, magnoliamarksstudio.com.

“The goal is to make calligraphy accessible,” she said.

Andrea Brown: 425-339-3443; abrown@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @reporterbrown.

Sound & Summit

This article is featured in the summer issue of Sound & Summit, a supplement of The Daily Herald. Explore Snohomish and Island counties with each quarterly magazine. Each issue is $4.99. Subscribe to receive all four editions for $18 per year. Call 425-339-3200 or go to soundsummitmagazine.com for more information.