Ancient Calligraphy & the Art of Life

Pictures Tell a Zillion Stories

Calligraphy is considered by many people to be the "art of beautiful handwriting". The formal term may find its origin in the Greek words for beauty and writing. It implies a knowledge of the proper cadence of letters, i.e., the signs by which language can be communicated and the ability to make them by the placement of the different parts as well as the harmony of proportions that someone with experience can recognize as a work of art, so to speak. In other words, calligraphy, as an art form, isn’t required to be legible in the conventional sense of the word when applied to writing as I am right now.

In East Asia and the Middle East, calligraphy is an old and strong tradition and is considered to be a major from of art, on the same level with sculpting and painting. In the West, the conventional Latin-based and Greek-based languages/alphabets, in addition to the global increase of literacy, have developed handwriting as an art form that any person can learn these days. Nevertheless, after the introduction of printing in Europe in the mid-15th century, a strict distinction developed between handwriting and more ‘sophisticated’ forms of alphabets and scripts. Near the end of the 16th century, new words were invented in most English speaking countries that stood for "calligraphy". Writing books from the 16th century through the present day have continued to distinguish between ordinary handwriting and what many people refer to as decorative calligraphy

The Alphabetical Tao

Chinese script is a form of writing that relies on pictures, and it’s written with thousands of distinct characters referred to as pictograms or ideograms that have no connection to an audible word per se. Linguists refer to the earliest Chinese characters as "pictographs", e.g., the image of a crescent was used to represent the moon, or a circle with a dot in the center to represent the sun. Gradually these gave way to non-pictorial ideograms which, in addition to standing for tangible objects, also represented abstract concepts. The majority of Chinese characters have two dimensions: 1) a phonetic that communicates the sound of speech, and 2) a signific that communicates the meaning of a word. Characters known as hanzi are used to write the Chinese language, and eight fundamental strokes are used to compose Chinese characters.

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