Beach Calligraphy by Andrew van der Merwe

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Andrew van der Merwe loved to write and draw letters from early childhood, so it is not surprising that he became a professional calligrapher in his adult life. But no one could have thought that our hero would use his skills on the ocean shore, leaving mysterious messages on the wet sand …

Andrew van der Merwe has been living in Cape Town (South Africa) for many years. He always loved to be on the ocean, surf and draw some squiggles on the wet sand. However, the author admits that scratching the sand with a stick did not give him any pleasure, since the drawings were rather ugly. The next seven years our hero spent on inventing tools for sketching on the beach and improving his technique. Over time, its squiggles have evolved into clearly drawn letters and symbols that attract the attention of tourists and the press.

As a calligrapher, Andrew van der Merwe is especially interested in African colonial and pre-colonial writing systems, the styles of which the author tries to replicate in his beach drawings. In addition, in the works of the master, you can see elements of the modern Tuareg writing of Tifinagh.

Despite the fact that Andrew van der Merwe's sand drawings are similar in style to mysterious ancient scripts, in fact they do not carry any absolute meaning. In other words, these are not words, and certainly not a coherent text - just icons and squiggles that the author refers to as asemic writing, that is, one that is created without words and is unreadable. Such writing can be understood only with the help of intuition and perception.

Despite the fragility, the works of Andrew van der Merwe are simply amazing, and the author himself is madly in love with his work. He calls his beach calligraphy "the ancient message of the ocean itself" and claims that "even writing without a single word is filled with logic, inner movement and poetry."