Kent Rucker's Art

 Paris is a marvelous city. It has everything that I love about city life. Food, wine, romance,museums, outdoor markets and chic. The photo above demonstrates the connection between the natural world and the use of characters to communicate certain ideas. The idea for this character goes back 45 centuries.

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 Many people think that the Chinese discovered and invented everything first. There is good reason to build a case in favor of that assumption. However time and space do not favor an exploration in Chinese inventions. So instead I'll focus on one of their creations, namely "Calligraphy'

In China, calligraphy is considered the highest of the arts. Some say there are over 45,000 characters. Experts consider many of them to be 'monstrosities'. Mastery of 4000 characters enables one to read the news paper. However add to this number the six scripts of characters,which are, Seal, Clerical,Standard, Running,Cursive, and the number greatly increases. Seal script which is the oldest form, said to be 3000 years old, was believed to have been first seen by the first emperor of China Fu Hsi, written on the back of a dragon horse that came out of the yellow sea, just for that purpose. In 1900 a Chinese scholar found animal bones and tortoise shells with these ancient characters carved into them.

 Unfortunately I have to apologise for the quality of these photos. I was not at one with my camera.

Bones and bronze were used to display early characters. Assuridly many works of art were created on perishable materials, that either decayed with the passage of time or were destroyed as part of the divination ritual.

The tools used to make these characters were carving instruments, thus the uniform thickness of the lines.

Standard script which is probably the most familiar to westeners is the basis for at least two other styles' running and cursive. Neither of which I know how to do.

The screen above is done on two layers of hand made paper, which was then glued to a brocade sheet of cloth,4ft by 18 inches

I chose the larger characters because they seem graphically similar. The top two character together mean 'many'. One of the characters by itsself means 'evening.' Below 'many' the next two characters means 'friends'  By themselves one means 'moon'. So 'many friends'

The four verticle columns beneath that are from the 'heart sutra'

 One evening I had the good fortune to meet a woman who was fluent in both Chinese and English. I asked her if she could translate a poem into calligraphy. She did. The results are above.

She also wrote the romanized pronunciations of the characters.

My first teacher couldn't translate the poem.

However  he quickly wrote out a poem in calligraphy by heart. When I asked him how many poems  did he know by heart ?He said 103. He said every day after school his father would teach him poetry.

The chinese are not impressed by a person who can do one thing well, but rather  the one who can do many things well. He was a chemical engineer and teacher.

 One of the ideas that I enjoy about doing Asian calligraphy is that once I understood the basics then I could become creative yet always referential to tradition.

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