Calligraphy & Chinese Painting
“He who has command of his brush should not allow the brush to control him.” Wang Ssu-shan.
Calligraphy deriving from Greek words for beauty and writing is a decorative kind of lettering used in writing. The letterer was a descendant of the clerk or scribe who had “aimed at legibility and formality” in commerce.[1] But in the Far East where calligraphy was more cursive or flowing, the script blossomed into a fully- formed artistic entity; moreover the Chinese saw the aesthetic dimension of the lettering itself rather than seeing it as a symbol of some external beauty.[2] Neither are Chinese characters to be seen as “abstract designs” linked to modern art, an error into which western abstractionists fall because they do not under Chinese art.[3] Calligraphy played a formative role in Chinese painting which is why some of their painting can be called logographic since images are occasionally accompanied by logograms, i.e. a written character that represents a word or phrase. Calligraphy was much favoured by the literati of China, so it is unsurprising that it overlapped with the art of painting itself, another love of the Chinese elite. Moreover, calligraphy and painting shared “identical techniques” which binds them together more than aesthetics or philosophy. It was the use of brush, ink and paper that opened up greater possibilities leading to an outpouring of diverse artistic styles. A calligrapher would use a resilient brush, sometimes composed of animal hair or “the barbs of a bird’s feather, bound into a bamboo stick, with ink made of compressed pine carbon and light glue rubbed in water.”[4] With manipulation of the brush and steady control, the calligrapher could produce a range of brush strokes ranging from a rich heavy line to a delicate light stroke. Calligraphy would begin to make its presence felt by influencing narrative painting in China, which apart from painting on pottery, stone pictures, and other materials, can be considered the first formalised and structured type of painting.
[1] Philip Rawson, Drawing, 137.
[2] Ibid, 138.
[3] As pointed out by Capek in Chinese Stone Pictures, 37: “Abstracted as the characters may be, they are not abstract designs, as some abstractionists in the west without any knowledge of Chinese approach them today. They communicate the meaning of language, and calligraphy thus differs from painting in the very basic fact that it is the communication of literal meaning in aesthetic form and not free pictorial creation.”
[4] Mary Tregear, Chinese Art, 50-51.
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