Techniques • Japanese Calligraphy

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The Japanese calligraphy is a medium which expresses itself on the poetic, graphic and physic aspects.

In Japan or in China, calligraphy is one of the three major arts, along with poetry and painting.

Practicing calligraphy involves a basic learning of the Japanese language, and an in-depth learning of brush techniques. The extraordinary Japanese writing system uses two types of characters :

• the kanji: characters holding a semantic value (with Chinese origin)
• the kana: characters holding a phonetic value, to which the student will get accustomed.

Learning Japanese calligraphy, along with a better understanding of the traditional culture grasped little by little, comes with the mastering of the brush.

Practice will make students discover step by step how to uses the tools, how the dynamics of the brush works, and how the ink is absorbed once layed on the paper. Then they will notice that in spite of the narrow links to the academic Chinese calligraphy, Japanese calligraphy has given itself a graphic culture they will recognize. With cursive writing, they will be able to put a little of themselves in what they produce through gestual pulsions.

Calligraphy implies the entier body into the action, it drives energy toward the tip of the brush, then flow out of the body in a deep breath. Calligraphy is the mastering of the body position, the rhythm in gestures. Then the breath and blood circulation regulate themselves, tensions vanish, muscular excercise lowers to the minimum.

If good reasons are needed to convince one to practice Japanese calligraphy, one could say that it allows :

• to satisfy the pleasure to discover the secrets of Japanese civilization,
• to get mesmerized by the graphic specificity of writing and mysterious beauty of the resulting shapes,
• to take therapeutic benefits from its practice, a natural physical and psychological balance,
• to master the birth of all the new shapes.

More than a graphic art, Japanese calligraphy is a self-expression path, the art of serenity.