Calligraphy meets Claude Monet

江山景物新

This phrase in Chinese characters is roughly translated as "Rivers mountains all anew." It is a line from a poem that forms my calligraphy assignment this week. Word for word, the five characters say "river mountain scenery new," and it's all about nature reawakening to spring. And it so happens that this week saw the Japanese Andromeda plant on our balcony start to bloom its pink bunches of tiny flowers again. This is in spite of the occasional warmish day being followed by a day sometimes cold enough for snow. Spring is in the air, however frigid, and we're all feeling it.

This is Monet's Vetheuil in Summer, and you might wonder what it has to do with calligraphy. Well, my teacher showed it to me last night when instructing me on the main point of that lesson.

The blurring of painting and calligraphy is a feature of Chinese art. They have traditionally been considered essentially the same thing, as expressed in the Chinese phrase shuhua tongti  书画同体, or in Japanese jiga dotai 字画同体 (literally "letter painting same body")

The brushwork in artwork, especially since the Impressionists, is virtually indistinguishable in technique from the brushwork used in calligraphy. My teacher directed my attention to the reflections of the trees depicted in the river or lake in Monet's painting - the horizontal yellow strokes, and asked me how many of them were the same. "None," I replied. "Ah ha!" The point was that just as in most painting no stroke is exactly repeated, neither in Chinese calligraphy should any stroke look exactly the same, even if, formally speaking, it is the same kind of stroke.

So that was my assignment when writing "Rivers mountains all anew": to keep changing the angle of the brush "artistically" to help give each stroke personality. Basically, it's that quality of changefulness that Wang Xizhi was one of calligraphy's leading lights of.

The above is my gyosho (行書) version of it, and according to my teacher it's my best attempt so far. I noticed later that one of the strokes in 物 (butsu), the second character of the word for "scenery," (景物 keibutsu), is missing. But gyosho being basically a somewhat abbreviated form of writing characters anyway, what I missed in form I hope I make up for in feeling!