love calligraphy that serves to do more than to write words — but rather, playfully suggests visual puns and curious designs. Letters can be either re-constructed to resemble an object (and a sentiment suggested by the object) as in the lovely piece of Arabic calligraphy below creating a coffee pot out of the Arabic phrase, “O Lord, keep us from the heat of fire”…
Or in this wonderful Japanese print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi of calligraphy strokes shaped by figures of entertwining cats to create the word for “catfish”…
The Arabic calligraphy is a scanned image from a lovely little chapbook, Islamic Calligraphics, published by The Merrion Press, London (1976). The Kuniyoshi print is from a terrific and comprehensive site of Kuniyoshi’s work, The Kuniyoshi Project maintained by William Pearl.