taha al-hiti calligrapher

taha al-hiti

Taha Al-Hiti: An architect, living in London. I first tried Arabic Calligraphy at the age of 6. Strangely, I was very keen in writing. I was obsessed with Calligraphy, and enchanted by the way the Arabic letters, words, lines were written and put together to form a paragraph or a calligraphy composition. At that age, I was unable to write or spell and my concentrations were all around the forms, I learned to write some lines without knowing the actual location of each word forming these lines, and without being able to read them, I only knew what they said (all) put together.

The art of calligraphy grew up with me. I used to spend hours writing on everything I had access to, resorting to walls and newspapers when I ran short of paper.
As I went further with the paper art, it was more than enough for me to get deeply touched by the shape of one letter only and that is what I ended up with: Writing one letter, meditate it for days, trying to find it's mechanism and energy.

At the age of 16, I was introduced to (Abbas Shakir Joody Al Baghdadi) who agreed to tutor me as a calligraphy student. At that stage, I could easily scale down calligraphy with my bare eyes, but Master Baghdadi preferred to start from scratch.
I was so touched by his work, that I learned to guess who the calligrapher was, with most of the famous pieces. By this time my senses were focused enough to differentiate between the different schools of Calligraphy (Turkish, Baghdadi, Egyptian…. etc.).
It was then that I realised how good my master was, and how much I had to learn. This started my analysis.

I believe that each and every person comes into this world with specific talents. The hard part is finding each individual's talent and enhancing it (with practice) to create the technique. Many people waste their talent, simply because they cannot find it.
Each art of creation in nature would consist of a portion of talent and a portion of technique (skill). Without technique, a talent could never be translated to reality. However, without talent, a technique could be very dull.

Different arts require different mixtures of the two. Some arts (portraits for example) have a bigger percentage of technique than talent. Composing, though, would certainly require more talent then technique. Calligraphy would require a maximum of both. You could have the technique that enables you to write a fine, properly set out, line of calligraphy. But composing a phrase in a circle would definitely require a high talent to create and construct the shape, and then highly skilled figures to keep the setting out & proportion of each letter correct.

Realising these facts at the time, made me feel how hard the way was. And that's when I decided to keep calligraphy as a passion and not a profession. From calligraphy, I fell in love with Architecture, as calligraphy, on it's biggest scales, is linked mainly to Architecture. I found out that they both take the basic argument of things as they are, and things as how they may be but not things as how they should have been. They both have the basis of proportion, "loose proportion; loose beauty". To be fair, architecture gives a bigger field to run in, more tools to work with, maybe that is what makes calligraphy more challenging as you only have a wooden bamboo pen and black ink made out of black dust.

Last to say, some calligraphers are so good, that people like me do not dare to hold a pen for weeks after looking at their work. One of those would have to be my Baghdadi master, whom I believe to be one of the best calligraphers existing/ to have existed on this planet.