Lately, a lot of things have been reminding me of shodo, so I'll write here for you too. It has appeared in my Japanese classes as a teacher, in exibitions I went at Japan House in São Paulo and every other day in my college.
Shôdo is an ancient form of Japanese calligraphy that nowadays it's considered art! Is all about stylish handwriting of Japanese characters, it's also a form of meditation and inspires different contemplations. Also, we have very distinct styles of shodo, some of them may not even look like the actual characters we use on a daily basis in reading and writing! Shall we check it out?
First things first: shodo material!
This is a picture of my own open shodo set, which was a present from a very dear teacher of mine. Here you can see:
- Fudê, a kind of brush
- Suzuri, an inkstone used to prepare the ink
- Sumi, black and colored chalks to prepare the ink
- Bunchi, a paperweight
Sometimes it is called meditation because you spend part of your time preparing the ink: add water to the suzuri and brush the chalk against the inkstone to create your own ink. Meanwhile, you focus on your breathing. Then, as you start the writing, your hand never touched the paper or the table. Your hand must always stay in a 90° angle to the paper so you can work on the letters. It requires a lot of motor coordination and calmness not to shake or stutter the brush.
Initially, when teaching calligraphy to children, we can let them use real ink, or they would just end up messing everything around! So, what we do is make them practice first only with water. As the paper is made of rice or silk, it's ok to train this way. The water will eventually dry and we will be able to use the same sheet several times!
Then, as we proceed in our training, we start making our own ink and start drawing simple lines such as:
We practice a lot of lines (where the brush makes a total halt and comes up out of the paper), a lot of "tails" (lines that are fading away until the brush comes off of the paper), a lot of "checks", (lines that stop and take an abrupt turn), so as to train the basic types of lines we have on Japanese characters.
We can either draw regular kanas, like this drawing I made of hiragana:
Or full kanji and even in different styles, like the one I had the pleasure to behold at Japan House:
Would you say the character above is 天? But the author swears it is! And he is right!
If you read it through, please give me your opinion about this article! I'm surely glad to share it with you!