Ron and Pat's Talent
By Rise
02 September 2022
In August 2022 I had the privilege of meeting Ronald and Patricia Shears.
Ron was very proud and quick to talk about his wife Pat’s achievements in art, sketching and calligraphy, showing me an amazing piece of art on the cathedral and churches of Rochester in the UK.
This piece of art is beautifully hand designed with calligraphy and sketch completed on pigskin. This piece of art took Pat approximately one year to complete for her College of Art assignment when she was 18. The principal of the Art college noticed Pats art beyond all other students and showed it to the bishop of the church who wanted to take the piece of art for his own purpose. Pats mum disagreed to the bishop keeping this, and it now hangs proudly on display in Pat and Ron’s home.
Ron was so proud of his wife’s art that he was too humble to speak of his own, which his daughter Jane was happy to share on his behalf. This sparked a huge interest of Ron talking about his career, which I was honoured to be shown.
Ron was a compositor who used letter press to create articles for newspapers and posters. This is something today’s generation are not fortunate enough to be aware of. This was the design of newspaper articles which now computers do but Ron completed this by hand. I learnt from Ron how the terminology lowercase and uppercase came to be today as the letters were put in cases, inked, and then pressed to paper. You can see one of Ron's designed on the cover photo of this article which reads " EXTINCTION IS FOREVER & PASSES ONLY ONCE"
Ron also had many other talents including writing books which can be found on Amazon screen plays and if that wasn’t enough, he is 4th dan in Taekwondo and won an award as the Oldest Australian at the age of 76 to complete a jumping back kick. This achievement was published in the West Australian.