The Canyon Between Western Art Training and Life

As I've been developing material for my upcoming Asian Brush Painting Workshop, it's taken me to a place I've visited before - how Eastern Arts are so very different than Western Arts.  There's only been maybe one person whose path I've crossed who is trained in Western painting but understands something about Eastern arts.  No doubt there are more, I've just not had the good fortune to cross their path.

It's such a gulf between the two forms that attempting to capture it is beyond my ability.  How to explain the concept of energy?  You know it exists.  You can feel it.  Yet, it's inexplicable.  Perhaps like love.  Thankfully, there are poets to point us in the right direction.

In Chinese calligraphy the most challenging 'painting' is a one-stroke painting.  That is, a painting consisting of just that - one 'simple' stroke of the brush.  It's the most difficult painting to execute because everything in the painting must be conveyed by that one stroke.  This is utterly foreign (no pun intended) to the Western artist and viewer.  The quote from D.T. Suzuki does hit the mark, “The arts of Zen are not intended for utilitarian purposes, or for purely esthetic enjoyment, but are meant to train the mind, indeed, to bring it into contact with ultimate reality.”

Han-shan, a Tang Dynasty poet, captured the dilemma of words saying,

“My heart is like the autumn moon,
pure as a blue-green pool,
No, this comparison sucks!
How can I explain?

How can I explain what is inexplicable?  How can you explain your experience of sex?  Indeed.

Asian Calligraphy

In what follows, I'll speak about Chinese calligraphy for both simplicity and a reflection of historical development as Chinese language migrated to both Korea and Japan.  It wasn't until the 5th or 6th century A.D. that important documents in Japan began to be written in Japanese, which is itself a modified from Chinese to reflect Japanese sentence structure and pronunciation.  Continuing, one of my sources added the following details:
"Chinese became the dominant written language form across East Asia from the Tang dynasty (618 - 907) and was practiced in both Korea and Japan, complementing their respective languages. In the case of Japanese language, the Chinese written form, kanji (kan= Chinese, ji = writing), was entirely integrated into the two existing written forms.  Japanese calligraphers will compose their work using purely kanji or sometimes uniting all three forms as in their everyday language.  In Korea, calligraphers will use either Chinese or Koean written forms. " 

In China and Japan calligraphy is the highest of art forms.  I suspect that is also true in Korea, though I don't know that for certain.  One source I consulted speaks of there being four art forms in China that are considered part of a well-lived life: calligraphy, painting, playing a stringed instrument, and the board game Qi.  This is different than what I had recalled, and one knowledgeable friend indicated that the Three Perfections are Calligraphy, Poetry, and Painting.  His comment actually conforms to my understanding.

Chinese painting is all about line in contrast to form.   Calligraphy really forms the basis, the foundation, for Chinese ink and brush painting.  For example, taking the brush's tip and making a line in contrast to lying the brush on it's side to color a larger field.  If you look closely at Chinese landscape painting, while they often will include some field of ink, for the most part they're composed of a multiplicity of line. Skillful use of the brush, learning to control the ink, combined with papers of various qualities, produces a range of painting styles.  Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is sung painting.   Michael Sullivan wrote a wonderful book by the title, the Three Perfections.

Besides these technical matters, calligraphy teaches the body practice that accompanies strong calligraphy.  If you examine some Chinese brush paintings, you will find that the brush strokes contain a strength that's developed from years of calligraphy practice.

Calligraphy is considered the highest art form, even ranking above painting.  For us Westerners, one aspect of calligraphy that's important to grasp is it's about more than writing an alphabet to construct words to write letters.  It's also a form of emotional expression.  In fact, the Chinese characters are not analogous to our alphabet.  In China, the thousands of various characters that it contains are actually pictographs and combinations of pictographs make up a word or phrase.

Typically, you'll come across discussions of there being five different styles of writing Chinese calligraphy: seal script, clerical script, cursive script, semi-cursive script, and regular script.  That is, there are five different ways of writing the same pictographs.  My personal bias is for the cursive script and my cursive script tends to be much looser than that shown in the link for cursive script above.

As for my calligraphy, I've studied with both Japanese an Chinese artists, and I just blend all that together not worrying about separating the Japanese from the Chinese.  One reason I'm not so concerned about mixing them up is because my interest lies in practicing writing the phrases as a way to develop stronger brush strokes as part of a mindfulness practice.  I've often been heard saying that "calligraphy doesn't lie."  What I mean by that is that while I'm pretty skilled at deceiving myself about how I'm doing overall, calligraphy always produces work that is a perfect mirror of how I'm really doing.

Space and Time in Art

This VERY BIG topic can only be chewed on in small chunks, and that's what I'll offer up here - a small morsel of a very rich meal.

Two-dimensional visual art, which is the form I practice, addresses - or uses - time in a wide variety of ways.  Monet studied how light changes on a cathedral’s façade and in his garden at different times of day and different seasons of the year.  Painting, like his of the cathedral, are sometimes hung in series, one after another in time.  A viewer walking past these separate images is viewing individual moments of light during a sequence of time.  The time it took him to execute them, the different times he executed them, and the time it takes the viewer to pass by and look at this series of paintings are all ways that time is used in visual art.

In Chinese scroll paintings, time is more continuous than it usually is in a single canvas executed using Western forms of composition.  Time flows as the scroll is unraveled and the next chapter of the story is revealed.

Rauschenberg executed very large prints composed of disparate bits and pieces from various points in time in contemporary culture.  Cubism deals with time by making the three-dimensional image flat and therefore takes time and compresses it.  It compresses time since it would take time to walk around the image that’s been rendered flat and therefore the viewer sees all angles at a single moment in time.   Dove Bradshaw, a contemporary American artist, addresses time explicitly in her work.  One way she does this is by executing pieces that actually change with time.

Thoughts?

Space and Time in Life

Space and time are inextricably  linked.  Not only in art, but in the sentient world in which we live.  Six years ago I was involved in a horrific auto accident in which my neck was broken in four places, one of which was a complete severing of my spine.  As my spinal cord didn't snap, but was 'only' damaged, I'm typing this as you would type, I'm breathing, walking, and living a 'normal' life.  Yet, it's a different life one that continues to unfold in surprising ways.


Recently, I became aware of some events surrounding my accident that I had no conscious memory until recently.  Wedged in what turned out to be my car, I saw all white, heard glass shattering and men yelling.  Other than those brief sense impressions I’ve got no conscious memory of smell, taste, touch, or pain.  It’s funny how there are just these other bits and pieces I do recall, like them cutting off my pants in the E.R., certain friends saying they are there, and whomever said that they needed to get me into the O.R.  Besides moments like those, my memory about any other sense impressions is a blank.


The sense impressions I do recall all seemed to occur at connected and distinct moments in time.  It's like how viewing slides used to be - one image than another.  Except there's one key difference.


Normally in life we have a sense of one moment to the next.  We usually recall what we were doing just a second ago, a hour ago, and so forth.  We have the sense of each moment’s part of the day’s movie.  There's a sense of each separate slide being part of a sequence.  That sense of continuity between moments was utterly absent for me.


When it did return, I didn’t actually realize anything like ‘oh, I’ve returned to my movie life now.’   My consciousness just returned to what I guess was normal and that must have included a sense of segmented moments also being part of a “a river of time,” in the words of Andy Goldsworthy.


What I have a felt sense of now, not just an intellectual idea, is that without a sense of time there is no sense of space.  Where this takes me is space will be revealed in time.