I used to paint often as a child and a young adult but don't so much anymore. When I did, it was primarily abstract watercolors in a style that I did not know how to describe, although I did some realist pieces as well. Only rarely will I take a brush to paper for that purpose anymore. Occasionally my calligraphy teacher will make reference to painting, putting it on the same level with the written art that we are studying now in my class. I haven't paid it much attention, frankly, being so focused on and motivated by the brilliant contrast between black and white and "separate heaven" in the one realm of the written image...
But now that I'm planning an upcoming trip to Washington, D.C. and checking out what exhibitions are on at the Sackler Gallery I see something that has the potential to change my attitude, probably for the better. They have an amazing show called Tales of the Brush: Literary Masterpieces of Chinese Painting and the online exhibition's Gallery Guide notes make reference to all sorts of new (to me) concepts as qiyun shendon ("spiritual resonance and lifelike motion") and The Three Perfections (poetry, painting and calligraphy). While reading about these developments I encountered this passage which sheds some very interesting light on the intersection of calligraphy and painting:
In addition to using common materials, calligraphy and painting have long been thought of as springing from the same creative source and requiring the same technical skills in execution, an idea concisely expressed by Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), a leading master of the early Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), in his famous poetic dictum describing identical technical approaches to writing and painting:
Do the rocks in flying-white, the trees in ancient seal script,
And render bamboo as if writing in clerical characters:
Only if one is truly able to comprehend this, will he realize
That calligraphy and painting are essentially the same.
Fascinating. I haven't yet mastered any of the scripts (still only four years into standard script, which they say takes ten years to master) and so I couldn't fully understand how seal script is ideal for drawing trees or clerical script is a natural fit with bamboo. But these links hint at a separate world I have yet to explore and the possibility for learning more excites me.












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