Michael Starkman
Calligraphy by William Stewart, sent to Michael Starkman
I met William sometime in the late 1970s, perhaps through a mutual acquaintance with a dancer named Rael Lamb. Around 1980 or a little after, William took a year-long master class in San Francisco with Thomas Ingmire, a renowned calligrapher. I believe Kathy McNicholas was also in that class. William earned a degree in teaching English as a foreign language from either San Francisco State University or San Francisco City College. As part of that program, he taught ESL classes. If I remember William's stories correctly, the classes were somewhere out in the Richmond and many of the students were Russian and didn't know that William understood everything they were whispering to one another in their native tongue.
[Q: What were some of William’s Milestones?]
Performing as Marlene Dietrich in a Billy Talent Show was a highlight. This was before my time in the Billys and I've only heard about it as legend. For many years, William was fascinated by Dietrich and impersonating her was a major event in his life. He commissioned the dress, shaved his beard and, from what I've heard, completely dazzled the audience. At William's 60th birthday party, he performed as a Russian chanteuse. For this event, William finished a huge piece of art created entirely of vintage postage stamps on black silk netting. He had labored over this piece for a long time on Martha's Vineyard and then back in San Francisco, and I was one of the loyal friends who spent hours at the last moment, pasting the last of those stamps under his strict supervision. William's completion of his Mandelstam project was an enormous milestone — a huge construction with hand lettered pages in both English and Russian and vintage objects chronicling the life, death, and work of the Russian poet. William made his own translations of many of the poems. His insistence on giving the piece to a Soviet museum became a harrowing Cold War adventure. I think this was a milestone in his life in another way as well, as he never attempted to make another calligraphic work of the same scale or ambition.
I think that his family's long connection with the Middle East and the years William spent in London fed his fascination with history, geography, and world cultures.
William was a scholar. On his own, he studied world history and geography with extraordinary thoroughness. He seemed to know everything about the history of both handwritten letter forms and typography, not only in the West but worldwide. With his extensive knowledge of linguistics and literature, he had a profound understanding of the correlation between different cultures with their writing systems — and was able to invent his own.
William wrote wonderful journals during his travels in Japan, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and North Africa. In later years, he shared those writings online; he xeroxed and hand-bound the handwritten pages of the journal from Japan.
— Michael Starkman
