Caligraphy

The teacher's name is Lin Xu Lan. He is a professor of chemical engineering here at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology, but caligraphy has been his hobby all his adult life. He says that, "Sometimes the hobby is the teacher." Speaking through an interpreter, he told us that caligraphy consists of four things:
1. The concept for the caligraphy;
2. The writing of the caligraphy;
3. The artist's signature and dating of the caligraphy; and
4. The placing of a seal on the caligraphy.

He says that only China has a history of using writing as an art form itself. Similarly, Chinese landscapes differ from Western oil painting. Chinese landscapes have multiple points of view, instead of a single one. Chinese landscapes are always painted on paper, instead of canvas. The best caligraphy paper comes from Xuanzhou. Caligraphy brushes are made from wolf hair or sheep hair (wool?). Historically, caligraphy was done with a block of ink made from pine smoke (not sure of the translation here, possibly pine resin mixed with charcoal?) and an ink stone ground down the block of ink, then the resultant powder was mixed with water to make ink.

Our teacher uses black ink from a bottle. He says that using different thicknesses of ink creates five colors from a single ink. He shows us how it is done, then lets us try, using two simple charachters, one for "river" and one for "mountain". Ours look childlike.

Then he shows us how he draws a landscape. The paper looks like tissue papers, but feels heavier. The landscape does have a number of focal points, then he signs and dates it, and puts several red seal prints on it. All seals are red. He uses four. One has his name on it, another the name of the style of caligraphy he uses, another the name of the school where he studied caligraphy and a fourth with the name of his caligraphy teacher.

I was most impressed in the personal pleasure the teacher seemed to have in caligraphy, and his willingness to share that pleasure with us. One of the American teachers is a long time amateur landscape artist, and she was extremely happy watching him and asking questions. The teacher had written a book about the subject, and I was pleased to see that it was small but had beautiful reproductions in it. Assuming he has the same pressure to produce academic work that professors do in the United States, the fact that he took time away from his professional life to write a book about his art is a remarkable thing.