July 31, 2002
New Maya Monument Appears

Here's more from Mark Van Stone about his glyph installations at Southwestern College. The photos on this page link to larger ones.

"Each glyph was sandblasted 1/4 inch deep, twelve feet square, from a stencil-template cut from plexiglas with a CAD-CAM-driven high-pressure water jet. Since they had to blast fourteen copies of it, and the surface of the limestone plaster was too friable for traditional adhesive sandblast-masking, I was forced to design a glyph stencil-style, with no closed forms whose middles would drop out of the template. So I designed calligraphically, after the Palenque 96-Glyphs tablet and various ceramic inscriptions, which often leave gaps between the strokes. Though a few strokes suffered from forced gaps, all in all the design worked out quite legibly and prettily, I think."


Posted by Dave at July 31, 2002 01:30 PM