Whilst at the Giggling Tree, we’ve had a calligraphy lesson with Lia a local artist. She has a studio just outside the guest house but even so we arrived dripping from the rain. Consequently, we started our lesson all cosy but with several very interested by-standers sheltering from downpour.
There are over 3000 characters and several variations in style. This put into context the struggle Will is currently having correctly forming some of the 26 characters in our alphabet! Lia started with instruction on how to hold the brush (vertical and with fingers arranged for control) and then how to load ink and form a point. We then moved on to eight basic strokes that form the characters. For each, even a ‘simple’ dot, there were several movements of the brush and how and where you started and finished were both important. We followed Lia’s instruction with varying degrees of success, I think we each had a favourite/more successful stroke.
After a while, we had generated several reams of ink covered bamboo paper. Will thought it better to cover himself in ink as usual. Lia then got us to move on to combining the strokes into some simple characters. After over an hour of a fair bit of concentration, giggles and ink smudges, Lia finally suggested that we might like to practice a character to draw and frame. Since ‘Beaumont’ means ‘beautiful mountain’ (well that sounds better than ‘nice hill’), we asked how that might be written in Chinese. Luckily, there were two (relatively) simple characters that we could use -‘mei’ for beautiful and ‘shan’ for mountain. ‘mei’ is the most complicated of the two, looking a bit like a four teared pagoda with legs and using several different strokes. ‘shan’ is simpler, it looks a bit like an anchor which I guess is apt too. After a few practice goes, we all drew on a square of rice paper and Lia mounted them for us. We asked Lia to do one too, for comparison. Lia also had some of her own art on display and Ellie finally bought a painted fan which she’d been looking for for a while. It’s a little bit more special having met the artist too.
It was fun to have a taste of Chinese calligraphy and you can see (from other people’s characters and not ours, I hastened to add) why the Chinese revere it as an art form. However, we’re all glad that we didn’t have to learn it at school and can stick with the much simpler English and Welsh alphabets!
(images of characters from http://www.chinese-tools.com)
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