This site was created by Josh Berer. I am a calligrapher and craftsman currently living in Bloomington, Indiana. I created this website to allow people to get custom written Arabic calligraphic works commissioned. Many people have an interest in having a tattoo designed in Arabic calligraphy, but as far as I know, there are no artists working online that offer hand-written calligraphy for tattoos, as opposed to computer-generated fonts. The results of a computer-generated Arabic tattoo are not only boring aesthetically, but can result in absolute tragedies of tattoos, due to computers not rendering the Arabic fonts properly.
I came to calligraphy from two directions. The first has to do with my upbringing: my mother is a professor of Islamic Art History, and my father is a bookbinder and makes illuminated manuscripts of his poetry. Between them, there is a pretty decent library of works on Islamic design, calligraphy, typesetting, paper arts, and illumination from which to draw inspiration growing up. The second direction is my past experience with art: starting when I was 14, I immersed myself in the world of graffiti, and so coming from that background, the art of the written word is familiar, although from a rather different perspective.
The switch from graffiti styles to Arabic calligraphy is not as dramatic as one might think. The hand motions that a graffiti artist practices thousands upon thousands of times are not that dissimilar to those a student of calligraphy must practice thousands upon thousands of times, until every letter comes naturally and produces a perfect result.
When I got to college, I started learning Arabic and encountered Arabic calligraphy. I was sitting and sketching a piece of graffiti, and it dawned on me that graffiti in Arabic was almost heaven-sent. The flow of Arabic letters lend themselves so naturally and perfectly to graffiti that I couldn’t help but to try it.
Shortly thereafter, though, I had a second realization. To jump into an ultra-modern manifestation of Arabic calligraphy such as graffiti without a firm grip on the traditional is, in my opinion, disrespectful. I feel that to do graffiti in Arabic, I first must pay my dues and learn where the roots are. So, for the moment I’ve put Arabic graffiti on hold. However, graffiti will always be a huge influence on my calligraphy, and that is something I’m forever going to bring to the table.
After I graduated college, I moved to Sana’a, Yemen, where I enrolled in private classes to do advanced work in Arabic grammar, literature, and Islamic studies. My teacher, fortuitously, was also a calligrapher, and so in addition to homework in grammar and vocabulary, he also assigned calligraphy homework. In the six months I spent in Yemen, I spent 2 to 3 hours a day practicing calligraphy.
Since 2003 I have moved to a different place every year, with Sana’a, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Amman, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York all in the mix. I keep a regular blog where I write about projects I’m currently working on, and things going on in my life. I graduated from the University of Washington in June of 2007 with a degree in Near Eastern Languages. While my focus was in Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish also played roles. I am currently a graduate student at Indiana University’s Central Eurasian Studies Department. I am focusing on two tracks, Turkic and Iranian. I am 26.