Heart sutra

in Chinese

Exploring basing my tracing paper calligraphy on the Heart Sutra, a text I have worked with before visually.

Some versions:

standard script

running script - Zhao Mengfu 13th-14th century





cursive style

Tsai Yulong - contemporary

Adeline Wysong - contemporary

what is a photograph?

Interesting article in new York Times on the 'identity crisis' in photography as the shift continues away from documentary image and chemical process towards the constructed image and digital process.  Photography involves creating with light, an image. . . that seems to be about all that can be agreed at the moment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/arts/design/with-cameras-optional-new-directions-in-photography.html?_r=0

Tess Jaray

Paintings and Drawings 1964-84
Ashmolean

Shapes drawn on a grid (like Bridget Riley); in the final work this has disappeared and become an invisible element but with great importance - the viewer has a subliminal awareness of it, of what ties the whole thing together.
An aesthetic defined by many detailed decisions.
Influence of Islamic architecture - 'the emotive values and properties of space'; 
' the way the decorated surfaces reveal and unite the structure without merely decorating or adding to it.' (TJ)  

Villandry 1966

'Patterning that is more powerful than decoration...' = her explanation of her surfaces.
Her April suite:  cut outs in the the top print reveal areas of intense colour in the print beneath.

The forms refer to objects - a wave, a waterfall - '...but I never come too close.'
Quotes Titus Burckhardt re. Islamic art, that it uses 3 means to convey the unity of experience: geometry, rhythm and light, 'light which is to visible forms what Being is to limited experience'

pictogram exercise

Making language: impetus, workshop and visual languages
Harriet Edwards and Yen-Ting Cho
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice vol 6 no.1

Report on a workshop that arose out of awareness of the difficulty of translating Chinese or Japanese into English.  English has the ability to be very precise.  Chinese has no articles, tenses, phrasal verb prepositions (e.g. look up, look out), participles or auxiliaries.  Translation has to be loose, open.

The authors became interested in language rooted in pictograms.  This is very evident in early forms of Chinese calligraphy but there are some traces visible in contemporary characters.  They decided to try out some exercises to engage imaginatively with this.

Participants were given a theme, 'summer spaces' and asked to draw images that they connected with this. In pairs, they were asked to guess at the meanings of these, and they were given 'loan words' and 'compound words' (?) to expand the language.  After sharing their experience of this, they were invited to write a haiku or imagist poem - presumably using the language they were developing - and to translate it to their partner either in English or/and using sound or gesture.  (This last part was a little unclear)

I found myself fascinated by this and wanting to try it out for myself.  What is it like to write a language based on imagery, on the visible world?  What are its possibilities, its limitations?  How might this connect in to my - as yet to be developed - meaningless calligraphy? I like the participatory aspect of it.

yen-ting.cho@network.rca.ac.uk
harriet.edwards@rca.ac.uk

Chinese Calligraphy

Ouyang Zhongshi and Wen C Fong: Chinese Calligraphy
Yale University Press 2008

Wen C Fong: Prologue
Calligraphy and painting inextricably bound.  Both ideographs (the picturing of concepts) and painting (the picturing of nature) are seen as expressions of the artist's self, as bearing his/her 'presentational energy'.

WCF describes the component parts of one piece of early (1300BCE) calligraphy in 3-d terms:
'With their silhouettes fitting together and set against the flat material ground of the bronze surface, they create a planar structure with fully articulated organic forms in the round moving independently in space.'
Poised to go 3-d

The space around the figure is not just background but 'belongs' to the figure and contributes to its qualities.  A yin-yang relationship between line and surface, negative and positive, carrying energy .  Also a place that carries an extension of the calligrapher's body; calligraphy as '. . . the materialisation of the power of the artist. . . to appreciate calligraphy is to relive the physical action in one's mind.' (Gao Yougong)  A calligrapher uses their whole body, their calligraphy a kinaesthetic form.  Also connected to what is being represented: '. . . a correspondence between the form of motion in nature and the motion of his hand in drawing.'

Figurative painting is understood to convey the spirit of it's subject through its material form, through its 'form-likeness'.  The image through its magic likeness to this spirit is the prototype of the natural form (not the other way round as in western art).

Calligraphic brushstroke is the key to painting; what is painted is a 'trace', an extension of the artist's self. Contrast the western view of a painting representing something external to the artist and is considered from the viewpoint of the viewer; the presentation of the artist is missing e.g. from semiotic theory.  Objects can be painted calligraphically using different styles of brushstroke.

In standard script, the strokes and dots create the structure while the turning brushwork expresses emotion; other way round in cursive script.  Running style evolved at a time when expression of individuality was becoming possible.

By 8th century virtual space had evolved in painting with foreshortening and 3-dimensionality.  A landscape shows not what the artist sees but what is in his mind's eye; makes a vastness of scale possible which is organised into one of 3 planar structures, vertical, horizontal or mixed.  Continual adjusting of relationship to what might be seen as pictorial illusion.

To paint something was a process of aligning oneself with the understood truth of things, not mimetic.

The work is an invitation to contemplate. 

Art practice seen by some as a servant of the Dao or Great Way, by others as fed by it.

Calligraphers revisited past masters, copying, adapting innovating.  Who was chosen and how their work was treated could express political views.  Brushstrokes can be laden with art-historical connotations and so stylistically communicate intention and meaning.

A poetic appreciation of individual calligraphic works or styles eg. 'light as a startled bird', 'like vines and grasses linked together', 'a gentle wind breathing through the forest'.

Shitao's one-stroke painting - myriad forms emerging, all connected, brought into relationship and order by his one flowing stroke.

* * * * *

Flicking through the images in this huge volume, some of the things that caught my eye:

• the particular kind of elegance of incised script (as opposed to brushwork)
• decaying supports with ragged edges and rough holes, mottled surfaces (like a rough monoprint), edges of lines crumbling so form starts to dissolve
• the structures (boxes within boxes) that shape a character
• the way red seals animate a monochrome script; what governs their placing? (sometimes overlap script)
• calligraphy on bamboo strips; strips stored in transparent tubes and arranged vertically
• fluidity of 'I know your sadness' p131
• ying huang zhi, a type of semi-transparent beeswaxed paper used for tracing calligraphy
• vertical columns always very straight
• dense text, the effect of an eruption of space into this
• subtly different shades of paper (creams, browns, pale green) joined together
• cursive script looser than running; despite the names, characters are rarely joined together but much greater irregularity of size, emphasis given to different strokes
• the free-est calligraphy in the book is by Mao Ze Dong



Mao Ze Dong, Poem written on the Long March 1935

Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin The Complete Lights 1961-96
Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell (Dia Art Foundation and Yale University Press, 2004)

Michael Govan: Irony and Light
Using industrial materials, picked up Tatlin's cry of 'real materials in real space'. 
The tubes present sculptural possibilities and painterly (mixing colours together moves them towards white - with paints they go to black).
Rejected any mystical interpretation of his work, denied he had any inner vision and defended his work against academic interpretation.  Just fixtures and tubes that create an optical experience.  He said: Symbolising is dwindling - becoming slight.  We are pressing downward towards no art - a mutual sense of psychologically indifferent decoration - a neutral pleasure of seeing known to everyone.  In fact he didn't even create 'works' but rather 'proposals' for a particular situation.

Critics however cannot resist e.g. quotes Elizabeth C Baker saying that pure light has qualities of being 'seductive and confusing'; as overwhelming both the viewer and surrounding space; as having a 'symbolic capacity to arouse an emotional response; as retaining echoes of sun, fire, warmth, mystery, life. 

Brydon E Smith: Reflections and Thoughts about Dan Flavin
Quotes DF on his first tube piece: 

The Diagonal of May 25th, 1963

'There was no need to compose this lamp in place; it implanted itself directly, dynamically, dramatically in my workroom wall - a buoyant and relentless gaseous image which, through brilliance, betrayed its physical presence into approximate invisibility.'

Chinese painting exhibition

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900
Victoria & Albert Museum
Went back a second time to look at this; the first had been an overview, this time I was particularly interested in the material aspect of the works - how they were made and presented.
The shanshui (= mountain and water = landscape) paintings of the Song period (950-1290) meet the challenge of how to translate philosophical ideas - humanity's place in the cosmic order - into images. In the 12th century interest began to shift onto depicting naturalistic light.
In the Yuan period the austere 'aesthetic of solitude' emerged, black ink on white paper, with artists who had fled urban life with its constraints to live in the mountains, trying to express emotion and thought in image and poetry, the two interwoven.  A bond emerging between monks and scholars, 'apparition paintings' in pale tones expressing the immateriality of things.

Paintings take the form of:

• horizontal scrolls which juxtapose or combine calligraphy and image with textile bands between - this aestheticises joins between sheets of paper
• hangings bound by fabric either just above and below, sometimes divided, or along the sides as well
• albums of small paintings

A lot of inventiveness in this e.g. in the relative size of textile to painting, colour links between the two.  Upper bands (heaven) always larger than lower (earth)

Palette largely monochrome with touches - all the more effective for being just touches - of turquoise and soft jade green.
Ink washes appear to float on the surface of silk or paper.  Colour is never textured.