After reading Chu Yun's paintings, I think of what I often call literati paintings and painter paintings. In the history of painting in China, the works of Guan Tong, Li Cheng, Fan Kuan, Guo, Wang Ximeng and others belong to painters. The relationship between painting and calligraphy is not very close, but it is not completely unrelated. If you don't know calligraphy at all, you can't draw well. Zhang Tangyanyuan said, "Wang Xianzhi wrote a book." Later, Lu Tanwei also painted strokes continuously, so we know that calligraphy and painting use the same method. In the Yuan Dynasty, painters borrowed calligraphy from their paintings. We look at Gu Kaizhi's work A History of Women in the Jin Dynasty and other paintings in the Yuan Dynasty. The lines are thin and round, and the pens are round and round, and there are few hard ones. Later people called it "spring silkworm spinning", which was influenced by the lines of seal script. Seal script is basically round and less changeable, mostly round and less square. Literati painting rose in the Song Dynasty and flourished in the Yuan Dynasty. Since then, literati painting has been the mainstream of Chinese painting, and literati painting has to go through calligraphy.
Literati mainly focus on literature and are not good at painting. If you compare with the painter in shape and color, it will be inferior. But all literati are good at books, and "style, speech, calligraphy and writing" are the basic conditions for ancient literati to be an official. People with disabilities, poor speech, poor handwriting and poor composition can't be officials. Therefore, ancient literati must write well. Both writing and drawing use brush and ink, so people use calligraphy to draw. Zhao Mengfu concluded: "Stone white is like a fly, and bamboo is ripe in eight ways. Anyone who can understand this will know that painting and calligraphy are the same. " All kinds of pens in painting come from calligraphy, so painting is also called painting. Literati in Yuan Dynasty and later wrote with brush and pen, and their skill lies in calligraphy. In the early Qing Dynasty, Shi Tao said, "Painting is related to general calligraphy." Wu Changshuo in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China said, "Learn directly from calligraphy." Therefore, people who don't know calligraphy or have poor calligraphy skills are talking nonsense if they want to draw literati paintings well.