Painted Calligraphy 绘书 (huìshū) has occupied me for many years because it allows writing and painting to meet on the same surface. Chinese characters remain the starting point, but through repetition, layering, color and rhythm they gradually lose their purely linguistic function and become part of the image itself.
In this article, I would like to show the process more closely through two contrasting approaches: the dense monochrome works I call Black Zen and a group of painted calligraphies dominated by red. The accompanying video offers a more direct impression of how these works develop through repeated writing, overpainting and spontaneous decisions.
Painted Calligraphy: An Intermediate Stage
Let’s begin with a work that shows an intermediate stage of the process. In Spring, the layered green and yellow characters suggest foliage. Individual signs remain visible, while their repetition begins to create a larger rhythm.
In Ice Blue, I restrict the palette to a single colour. Different densities and dilutions still produce considerable variation, from pale turquoise traces to darker, more insistent marks.
Some of the Daoist and Zen ideas that interest me lead me towards reduction. I do not mean that either tradition can be summed up as “less is more”. In my own work, reducing the palette makes me attend more closely to the relationships between the marks. With fewer colours to carry the image, rhythm, spacing and changes in pressure become more important.
The brush also changes the result. For softer strokes, I use a soft-haired brush; for greater spring and sharper changes of direction, a firmer one. The red work below has a more forceful rhythm than Spring. The white channels between the layered characters help keep that energy from becoming a single undifferentiated mass.
Red Dao
A wave in the sea is an image I return to when thinking about individuality. Each wave has its own shape, yet it cannot be separated from the sea. I associate this with the Zen question of attachment to the self. In painted calligraphy, every mark remains an individual decision, but the work also asks to be seen as a whole.
This thought also informs Red Dao. Up close, the eye follows particular characters and brush movements. From a distance, their separate identities begin to give way to the movement of the whole surface.
Painted Calligraphy in Process
The origins of this approach go back to my years in Beijing in the late 1970s. I have described that story, and how repeated writing gradually became a form of painting for me, on my Painted Calligraphy Series page.
Black Zen
For Black Zen, I reduce the palette further, to black ink on pale paper. Several aspects of the preparation matter to me:
Painting material: Handmade paper and a responsive brush.
State of consciousness: A long period of meditation before starting work.
Philosophy: Daoist ideas and an interest in musical counterpoint.
Background music: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.
The Role of Dao
Daoist thought enters through relationships: light and dark, density and openness, stillness and movement. I want the work to hold a meditative mood without losing its force. What may look like random scribbling from a distance depends on many particular decisions. A careless line can disturb the rhythm even after several layers have crossed it.
Why Palestrina? Music plays an important role in my work. What draws me to his music is the way separate voices can remain distinct while belonging to a larger order. I try to bring a little of my understanding of counterpoint into the relationship between the written layers. This is a painter’s response to listening, rather than an attempt to translate a score into marks.
The finished surface is dense, but I still want the eye to find its way through it. That balance between the individual stroke and the whole is what keeps me returning to this work.
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