Getting familiar with the dance of the brush

 

 

Painting is considered as one of the highest forms of cultural expression but calligraphy only as a minor one. Of course, the fact that many students did not understand Chinese was certainly one more obstacle for them to appreciate Chinese calligraphy. But at the beginning, I was just like them and I only learnt my Chinese later on. In China, calligraphy is seen as the supreme kind of graphic expression. Most of the people who have a look at beginner students taking a calligraphy class probably see constraint first: moves have to be repeated so students can really integrate them, the order and direction of strokes have to be memorized…Calligraphy can look like a demanding and unimaginative discipline. Grasping only the basics indeed requires time and effort, but once it is done, things get totally different. When people see a master writing, the brush seems to be a natural extension of his hand, fully connected to his mind and body and expressing their most subtle impulses with total spontaneity. In this process, the structure and shape of the characters get deeply modified, but harmony remains. When the calligraphy is finished, people who look at it carefully can get the original feeling of the moment of the writing by following the path of the brush. This makes calligraphies more than inert inscriptions. The life the calligrapher put in his piece of art never lives it and can always be appreciated.

I felt that calligraphy was as living as music, but, at the beginning, I could not imagine that some bridges between the two arts existed. Until a friend of mine who is a music virtuoso told me that a professor from the National Music Conservatory in Paris (CNSM) called Bruno Ducol was researching the relationship between music and painting by trying to translate into music some pieces of art that had struck his eye. Many works of Bruno Ducol stemmed from his contemplation of paintings by Western masters, a few originated in Li Bai’s poetry and, to be more specific, in the calligraphies of the poems. I was lucky enough to meet Bruno Ducol with my friend after a concert he gave in Paris, and as we were having a drink in a bar, we started discussing…