January Thirtieth

So I guess calligraphy is like pancakes, you throw out the first one.

January Twenty-ninth

January Twenty-fifth

New Page

January Twenty-third

Not as good as last time I think.

January Ninteenth

Here is my latest attempt. In my estimation there are three components to good calligraphy. The first is the actual strokes themselves. The beginning and ending of each stroke and the variation of the thickness of the line. The angle of the curves etc. The second is the structure or composition of the actual character, what my calligraphy teacher called 结构 "jiegou." Beautiful, well written characters are balanced from top to bottom, left and right and in their use of negative space. The third element is the flow of the strokes within each character and the flow of the characters within the piece. Well written pieces flow from one stroke to the next and one character to the next. This is a lot easier to see in xingshu or caoshu but it can be seen in kaishu as well.

January Seventeenth

I think I am getting better slowly but surely.

New Page

I am starting in on a new page this week. Here it is.

January Thirteenth

There are one or two strokes on this one that I think are pretty decent. The shu on the first character and the shu gou on the second character are pretty good. I still look like a six year old though. I do see improvement though, so it will be interesting to see where I am at in a couple of months.

January Tenth

I am trying a new technique today. I have been watching calligraphy videos on youtube, there is some good stuff there. I also used a new brush today, I will continue to experiment. Part of the problem is I am so out of practice that my arm starts to get sore after a while. Hopefully that will improve with time.

Early Attempt

At 无为

九成宫

This is the first page of what I will be copying. I have made a first attempt but it is too poorly done to post, I will try again before the weekend.

Explanation

I recently returned from living in China for a year where I rekindled my interest in Chinese Calligraphy. While I was there I purchased a book of Ouyang Xun's (歐陽詢）calligraphy （九成宫）. This year I am planning on trying to copy a page of the book each week and post my progress on this blog. I doubt that anyone will read this, it is mostly for me to chart my own progress, but I will pretend that people will.