Behind The Brushstrokes
Khoo Seow Hwa, Nancy Penrose |
Read this book for the tales of weird and wonderful calligraphers who dipped their hair in ink and wrote on walls, for instance, or buried their 18 baskets of worn-out brushes with the ceremony befitting fallen soldiers. There are a few chapters on the aesthetics and techniques behind Chinese calligraphy, but it mostly reads like short biographies of famous calligraphers, which are often colourful and sometimes inspiring.
Consider the story of the eighteen jars of water. Wang Xizhi is to calligraphy what Shakespeare is to literature, and he remains a rich source of legend and story, being known for eating ink-dipped biscuits out of absentmindedness, and for his fondness for geese, among other things. His son, Wang Xianzhi, is a famous calligrapher in his own right. Because his calligraphy was so much better than any of his cousins and brothers when he was a child, he decided at the age of 12 that his calligraphy was good enough and that further years of study were not necessary. The elder Wang took his son out into the courtyard of the house, pointing to the 18 huge earthern jars that stood full of water. Wang Xizhi told his son that the secret to success was to use up all the jars of water in preparing the ink for the practice of his calligraphy. That evening, Xianzhi went to his room and practised writing nearly 1,000 characters to show his mother the next morning. As he slept, his father came into the room, correcting "da" by adding a dot, which changed the characer to "tai". In the morning, Xianzhi's mother said that his calligraphy was not too bad, but that the one dot in the word "tai" was so well done that it was comparable to his father's calligraphy.
Feeling even more discouraged, young Wang went out for a walk and came upon an old woman baking pieces of flat bread. He watched her as she expertly and effortlessly picked up each piece from the fire and flung it over her shoulder, only to have it land, perfectly aligned, on the growing stack of baked bread behind her. Xianzhi was impressed, and told her so, to which she replied that her skill was nothing compared to that of a great calligrapher such as Wang Xizhi. "The only reason I can do this so well," she said, "is because I have done it so many times for so many years." Xianzhi left her, finally inspired to spend the long, long time it would take to become a great calligrapher like his father, and began to work his way through the formidable eighteen jars of water.