Remembering John Langdon

The Loss of a Friend

I am deeply saddened to learn of the loss of my friend, John Langdon, last week from a heart attack.  I was not only a friend of John's, I was also a huge fan.  Over the years, I had developed quite a collection of his artwork and today nearly all of the artwork in my office was created by John.

Until his move to California, I would visit John (or he would visit me) every Thursday night where we would show each other art, listen to music and talk about philosophy, society, the mind, Space and Time.  When he created a painting for my office, he designed a figure/ground ambigram that says both Space and Time within the same physical area to commemorate our conversations (shown at left in the photo above).

When we were talking about music, we discovered that although we were not exactly the same age, we both knew the entire discography of the Moody Blues.  As luck would have it, they were also touring at the time.  We went to the concert together and surprised each other by knowing all of the words to every song!

Of course, on our Thursday night gatherings, we also talked about ambigrams.  For anyone who didn't already know, John was one of the inventors of the ambigram art form (before it even had a name), and, in my opinion, was still one of the best at it right up until his passing.  He created the ambigrams for Dan Brown's monster bestseller book (and later, movie) "Angels and Demons" and was the inspiration for the main character, Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks in the movie).

John and I decided to create the world's largest and most sophisticated ambigram font.  We worked together with another fabulously talented ambigram artist named Daniel Dostal to create the FyreWater font, which is still in use at FlipScript today.  Here is one of the earliest sketches of the FyreWater ambigram font, and what it eventually became:

The very last ambigram that John and I worked on together was a possible album cover for Taylor Swift, who at the time, was planning an album release.  It didn't go anywhere, as Ms. Swift is a bit hard to reach these days, but it was fun to create nonetheless.

In addition to ambigrams, John was also fascinated by the Yin / Yang symbol and how it represents balance in the universe.  The light part of the symbol contains a speck of darkness, and the dark part contains a ray of hope.  John particularly like this Yin / Yang version containing Fire & Water.

For fun, I designed and 3D printed this Yin / Yang tealight candle set with a curved top to give to John the next time that I saw him.  Unfortunately, that time never came.

Speaking of John's Yin / Yang fascination: he had a dream that I would still love to help fulfill posthumously.  John had this grand vision of installing a giant Yin Yang statue that he designed in the heart of a city's downtown area.  In his telling of it, ideally the giant Yin / Yang symbol would replace a confederate slave-owner's statue and fulfill it's own destiny of bringing balance to the universe.

So, I took his vision seriously and turned it into a 3D printable object.  John then proceeded to have a miniature statue of that object created out of metal.  John wanted the final, installed version to stand 10 feet tall, and to have a completely chrome exterior - a huge mirror with no flat surfaces.

If anyone involved with city planning happens to read this, and has an old statue of a confederate slave-owner in their downtown area that needs replacing, please get in touch with me!

John was one of a kind, and I'm going to miss my friend.  Here is one of the last pictures of him at his Pennsylvania home.

More of John's fabulous artwork can be seen at his web site at www.JohnLangdon.net.