I hope I die with a pen in my hand, not a phone

Art trends: Fascist fonts, Severance>Nosferatu, Dark fantasy, Brutalism>Gothic, Brat>Gaga

These are the first words of my morning pages. The next natural sentence might be “and a smile on my face” but I don’t think I need to smile on my deathbed. My mind is constantly filled to the margarita brim with curious thoughts, I never wish to lose this ephemeral feeling and it is not happiness.

About a year ago, I stopped seeking joy as my emotional measure of success, choosing instead savouring a daily moment of erotic satisfaction. A eureka moment bursts from my tingling fingertips onto the page, offering a simple, potent gratification. The whisper of a thrill is all I need.

I once believed that anyone could be an artist, that creativity was universal. What it truly takes, is guts. The kind that fuels a lifelong obsession with following your imagination. Especially when no one’s watching, and no one’s clapping.

📱 Phone Notes : Where Ideas Go To Die

Divine inspiration is impatient. I used to stuff my ideas in my phone notes, letting them starve in silence instead of breathing life into them. Being chronically online means: 1317 notes in the idea graveyard. I fear it’s the same as taking 4,796 screenshots for "reference," only to never open them again - you knew it the second the shutter sound went off.

Art asks for faith before it offers form 🎨

Just as a newborn needs to be physically held or it will die, ideas need to be fed energy or they will never manifest. Writing ideas on pen and paper gives them oxygen, it’s casting a spell and I’m not gatekeeping because writing is magic.

This article lit a fire under me and made me write this newsletter. It pulls together recent studies showing that handwriting doesn’t just activate the brain: it ignites it. Typing doesn’t even come close.

“When students wrote the words by hand, the sensors picked up widespread connectivity across many brain regions. Typing, however, led to minimal activity, if any, in the same areas.” Charlotte Hu

In the words of Lorde & Wendy Williams. What was that? No wonder we have brain rot. Our 🧠✨ literally light up when we write, is this why writing lights me up? It echoes why art is so important, we use fine motor skills picking up a paint brush or musical instrument like with a pen.

I’ve made advocating for art my whole identity, but to know it’s supported by science has me feeling cute. So with this knowledge and to abstain from my phone addiction, I got to thinking: How can I make writing more exquisite = Calligraphy.

Part I: Writing as Ritual: Ink as Incantation🕯️📜

Writing by candlelight as I doodle & journal makes my life feel magical. I didn’t expect it to feel so soothing, so. Right. As if I were a heretic armed with a quill in a past life, it’s much more than journaling, I feel like V (for Vendetta my fav graphic novel+film) plotting a revolution.

Putting pen to paper forces clarity. It crystallises what I really want.

Pens are magic wands and declaring your wishes in ink makes them an invocation. To know your thoughts is one thing; to question their seeds is to truly awaken. To ask why is all there is.

Others may find your artistic process meaningless and not meaningful. Remember you were born to explore what it means to be human, not necessarily find the meaning of life.

Ink leaves no room for error, nothing can be deleted or erased. The words exist even if a correction was made, the mistake can only be crossed out. I like that.

There is a liberating permanence to it. A delicacy where you must have patience to let it dry so as not to smudge it. You can’t rush or be hasty or you tear the paper. You can’t slouch or lie down or the ink won’t run. It's inconvenient.

My mark of anti capitalism is how convenient it is. Art is anything but convenient, because adding details is bloody time consuming and time is always money people

Part II: The Erotic Haunting Of Ink 🖋️🩸

Writing is inconvenient, just like sex, and that is what makes it meaningful. You have to be inconvenienced in order to be present, in your skin, in your body, in your world. It stops everything, alchemising desire into a deep lasting love.

Fluids are filled with shame and writing with ink is messy. I easily get ink all over my hands if I’m not concentrating, so it requires deep presence, and attention. Pressure and release. Delicately placed fingers with intentional adjusting of your gaze. And when you get really good at it, when you’re in flow state, it feels effortless. I find it utterly erotic.

“We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalising sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.” Audre Lorde

What I love about art is that it outlives us.

Audre’s words move me today even though she passed 30 years ago. Personally writing is my deep life force and arouses me the way she describes. The addictive thirst to express circulates the soul of an artist. It’s enough to make you come

There’s an invisible idea haunting my periphery and it’s intoxicating. The draw of detail, the seductive trance of form is what it means to be an artist.

But I didn’t stop with Calligraphy, it’s natural progression in art is gothic script.

Yassified fonts💅:

For the icons who watch my channel The State of the Artist will understand my fetish for Blackletter font. It has a subculture connected to it, Pinterests top trend of 2025 - CastleCore 🧝‍♀️🏰 Think Joan of Arc in a chainmail slip dress, humming Ethel Cain under her breath in a cathedral. Religious trauma meets dark fantasy.

It’s giving renaissance fair, but make it high fashion and I get it. Because one thing is for sure: society has a deep longing for nostalgia and the “good old days”. Picture me: nonchalantly researching fonts and then becoming very chalant upon learning that Hitler used Fraktur. A Blackletter typeface.

Miss J

The plot thins…

Help, I’m scared. Is Blackletter an aesthetic or a pipe line? Maybe it was the fascist friends we made along the way? But then I thought about it and actually, the irony of whimsical GenZ girlies unknowingly reclaiming Blackletter is kinda fab.

Me when I lie. I’m so unserious please don’t cancel me over a font. No worries if not👍

I first spotted gothic script in 2023’s Saltburn movie poster

Since then I can’t escape it’s shadow like Nosferatu

It’s so old it feels brand new.

CastleCore isn’t vintage, it's Medieval antiquity. Depop final boss mode, but did they fly too close to the sun? Is that why actual knight armour is trending, because there are no more vintage pieces left to thrift?!

I jest, Perhaps we’re acting like ye olde peasants because, to our tech overlords we are the peasantry. Well hear ye hear ye, I put in a ridiculous offer on a guillotine and it just got accepted🗡️

Is Less Really More Or Is Less Just Less :

The artisan was pushed out of the modern world in favour of the industry of utility. Detailed adornment once attributed to luxury, decadence and prestige, were seen as unnecessary. But I’d rather be doing too much than live in a millennial grey home. Fight me 🤺

Sans serif is so Ai coded and Arial font screams “yes give us nothing”. Much like a corporate paycheck.

Sans Serif V Serif

The hit series Severance doesn’t just use serif fonts, it weaponises them. Cold, corporate, and clinical, they land like a blow to the psyche

Forma DJR Font

Utilitarian. Logical. Brutalist. Masculine perhaps?

Manifold Extended Font

Brutalist>Gothic: Minimalism>Maximalism⚖️

The world hypes up minimalism like it's the pinnacle of taste, but it didn’t just happen. To understand a trend I always look to the roots of it. The high trending Brutalism was born from the cold concrete of public housing and civic spaces.

Don’t tell me the suits didn’t sit down and rebrand poverty. Like “how can we get the poors to accept living in subpar housing? We'll make it an aesthetic.” Sometimes it’s just austerity with a better PR team.

What we ended up with were soulless Lumon buildings to cover building costs. The Grenfell Tower disaster in London: a monolithic tragedy that revealed how Brutalism, when stripped of care, becomes inhuman. So no, less isn’t more when cutting corners literally becomes lethal.

But here lies the predicament, I do enjoy some Brutalist structure, cue toxic cognitive dissonance. The coldness does it for me, it strips everything back to bone letting me know death is around the corner. Memento mori, remember you will die.

However it can’t be raw without having

Depth To It’s Design:

Ann Demeulemeester, Gareth Pugh and Rick Owens have been some of my most loyal style pins for 12 years. See my fantasy wardrobe Goth till I die. For the father of goth, Rick Owens, is extremely brutalist in design.

Rick Owens SPRING 2025 Ready to wear

Ethel Cain said “Darkness is inviting” and Rick Owen’s echoes that darkness. The void that we can’t escape pulling us into the nihilistic abyss. He masters the spirit of a villain and slams it into chic non binary form. My shadow self is impossibly sleek, unforgiving and cutting. I have literal fangs but figuratively speaking too.

“The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance” Audre Lorde.

Is Arial A Scam: Let Me Cook

If you think fonts don’t matter, see the business card scene in American Psycho ( I have spoken on the satire of this previously) It executes how fonts subtly signify wealth.

In the movie Saltburn, Oliver’s mother upon his death says “You don’t pick your childs name imagining that one day you’ll have think about how it will look carved on a headstone, choose a font”

and what does she choose?

I used to find fonts like TNR oppressively academic/intellectual upper class. But now Severance shows us how Arial/Helvetica fonts have sneakily become the new poster child of oppressive capitalist rule.

A serif font is a human motif born from calligraphy and cursive. Cursive is seductive, it’s sexual, it's flirtatious. Feminine perhaps? It’s detailed. Is being a woman noticing details?

Nah all artists regardless of gender stay seeing shit.

As a Charli XCX fan it puts me in quite the predicament, Brat’s whole identity is Arial realness. I don’t care, I love it. Arial narrow, with the width set to 90% to be precise. Her recent shows at Coachella were electrifying, but Gaga. Holy. Smokes. She is Calligraphy in the flesh. Now as a Brit I prefer Charli’s music, I don't even love Gaga down like that, but don’t play with her.

Absolutely everything about her shows was gothic, highly intricate and uber camp. Lady Gaga has seen queer people through the darkest of millennial crash outs, so to see her resurrection being appreciated by Gen z left the gays gagged.

The Demonisation Of Artists: A drag

You know you’re good if your performances are being called a “ritual” The satanic panic is trending yet again nothing new, because are you new here? Here we go again. Witch🫵 I’m tired, I fear that society is becoming terribly puritanical because that 2010 meat dress would’ve sent them into a coma today.

Gaga uses a lot of religious, and surreal imagery like crosses, bondage, monsters etc. These are all symbols she uses to comment on identity, fame, trauma and gender. Which will no doubt be unsettling on purpose, but evil?

In the same week Trump literally caused the stock market to crash, y’all didn’t bat an eyelid. But you’re frothing at the mouth over Gaga? The devil is always in a bad suit, not serving kunt in a white lace Dilara Findikoglu minidress

Talent is hypnotic, that's why you can’t look away. Maybe, just maybe it’s talent not the illuminati? But hey logic was never their strong suit. God forbid an artist catches a vibe? Can we give artists some credit, can we clap or do we only know how to cancel?

Tell me you never ate once in your life. You walk into a room and not a single head turns and it shows. It’s as though they’ve never seen performance art before, only Taylor Swift shimmying from left to right. So easily impressed that when something actually impressive happens, they jump right out of their Terf skin 👻

What? Pick your wig off the floor. Everyone loves art to push boundaries until it pushes theirs 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

So when the time comes I hope it is with pen in hand, and with an insatiable curiosity until the very end. When it’s time what will you be holding? Tell me below.

Love Liv x

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