Yìshù

Professor Yang gives me my first lesson in Chinese calligraphy. He is teacher, artist and calligrapher and obtained many of his skills during a 10 year period as a student in Spain. Writing Chinese characters is no simple matter as each stroke is carefully defined and must be executed in the correct order. I discovered that the correct order can be difficult to fathom and may well turn out to be the hardest part for me to learn. The teacher writes in red and the student in black so that the teacher's corrections can easily be seen. Taken seriously it can become a form of art and zen meditation but that requires years of practice and absolute concentration. It's still early days for me but we shall see how it progesses over the next months.

Update 1 week 2

This is how my work looked like after being corrected.

Room for improvement me thinks...

Update 2 week 3

This week I began a few attempts at 'Cao' writing style. (see lefthand image above). It is a quicker and more fluid writing style that is often used by calligraphy artists. Cao allows for more freedom of expression and has less rules. The main image shows the 'Kai' writing style which is a standard these days and most used in Chinese typography.

I still have a long way to go as can be seen by comparing the teachers work in red to mine but I am starting to remember important rules which allow me to concentrate more on the painting itself. It's similar to driving a car or playing golf, at first you have so many things to remember that you keep making mistakes but as certain actions become ingrained it gets easier and more fluid.

Update 3 week 4

I sense a marked improvement in my writing this week despite red corrections covering my homework. I have more control over the brush and have a better feel for the proportions of the characters. Still a long way to go though but I feel like I am progressing, which was certainly not apparent in the first weeks.

Update 4 week 5

It's my final week with Professor Yang as he will be heading off to China on a short term teaching contract. I would like to thank him for being a very patient teacher as we struggled to understand each other using mainly Spanish! I would also like to thank his wife who helped on ocassions with English translations and provided me with a very filling and healthy meal at the end of every session. My final work is Cao writing on a long vertical sheet of plain paper with no helpful guidelines. 

The end result looks quite impressive from a distance. But don't look too closely. Above is pictured the last session with Professor Yang. The final work below shows the Kai style on the left and Cao on the right. Now all I have to do is practice for the next few years.

Update 5 week 6

No class today but I do look at some calligraphy work in the Taiwan Museum of Fine Art. Several works have won awards but for the life of me I cannot see why. The gold award winner looks like he presented a piece of scrap paper that he was cleaning his brushes on. Clearly I am still very ignorant as to what makes a great work.

Update 6 week 7

I begin some informal lessons in the Chinese language and ask my Taiwanese teacher who has an MA  and speaks fluent English and German what the writing means on the image above. Apart from two or three characters she is unable to to tell me or decipher the script and goes on to explain that even well educated Chinese can only recognise roughly 30 percent of all characters. Not much hope for me then. But then again if you look at all the words in an English dictionary how many would you recognise? Probably 75 percent I should imagine.

Update 7 291212

OM

So, I have finally, after much ado, translated my OM poem into Chinese with Kai characters. As my understanding of Chinese is absolute zero I have to rely on various people who I trust to interpret the English version. The above image will be the basis for the painted version. I have already painted two test pieces which turned out OK despite some minor mistakes. Once I have completed one that I am happy with I will post it here. Watch this space. It is actually sometime since I practiced yishù but surprisingly it's much like riding a bike, once you have learnt the basics it becomes automatic and in fact a break can sometimes help.

Update 8 250113

OM painted

After 7 attempts I finally manage to write my poem in a kai style without too many mistakes. Mine is the unframed one in the middle. The 2 framed works are there for comparison. The one on the left is how I would ultimately like to write, while mine is presently closer to the one on the right. I would give it 4/10, mostly for effort:)