NOT AS EASY AS YI, ER, SAN (1,2,3)

I've been in a kind of wordless state the past few days, an in-between feeling, looking back on a few months of activity, engrossed mostly in reading and videos and Chinese language study. I am a little anxious because I am starting a new Chinese painting class this week, with a new teacher, a Korean nun whose style seems to be very different from that of my teacher of the past two-and-a-half years, a traditional Chinese bird and flower painter. It looks like she may be retiring; fortunately I have access to a new venue. But whether it is tai chi or wu shu or painting, we get attached to our teachers, our shifus. Eventually one of us moves on. The student feels humbled.

So feeling a little like Xue Rengui greeting his shifu in The Legendary Warrior, my latest Chinese series, based on a historical figure, I gather my energy to move on.

I didn't feel like painting today. I have no picture in my mind, and besides I've been reading about painting too much to focus on a particular subject, and I really don't even feel like writing. So I picked up a brush to try something different. Building on a few rudimentary lessons from my former teacher, I consulted a couple of fine textbooks on calligraphy and decided to jump into it.

Learning calligraphy is painting with no subject (although that's a stupid thing to say, really, a Chinese character is a picture, though practicing strokes is like practicing scales), writing with no words...learning it is like learning to dance. I remember my teacher's advice, I follow the 1,2,3, turn, press, and lift instructions in the book, and splatter and dribble like an uncoordinated moron. Over and over and over. Until eventually, I feel the rhythm of the brush stroke. I become one with the brush, and occasionally execute a stroke that looks almost acceptable. Never mind that there are many strokes to master, and characters are built up from them like a ballet. And then characters with characters to make a phrase or a poem. I practice the basic bone stroke*, the component of the characters for one, two, and three, recalling the fluid grace of the swordsman in Hero; the old monk who paints sutras on a wooden deck with his cat's tail in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring; Sammo Hung doing kung fu calligraphy in The Prodigal Son (go to 54:50 in the video), or the water painters on sidewalks I saw in Chinese parks:

Solo Running Script

Two-Handed Couplets

And I am still stuck on the simple bone stroke. "Practice, practice," my teacher says. "Slowly, slowly." For years and years.

*A quick search on this term yielded some hits I really wasn't looking for!!!