Calligraphy is a visual art that expresses spiritual emotions. It contains the creator's strong thoughts and feelings, spiritual temperament and aesthetic feeling. Therefore, the ancients had a saying that "calligraphy is the painting of the heart".
Zhang Xu, the great calligrapher of the Tang Dynasty, was famous for his cursive writing. Han Yu, who "went into decline after eight generations of writing", once commented on Zhang Xu's cursive writing in his article "Preface to Master Gao Xian" as "happy, angry, embarrassed and poor. Sadness and happiness, resentment and longing, drunkenness and boredom, injustice are all moved in the heart, and they must be expressed in cursive writing...The changes in the world, both joyful and regretful, are all contained in books." Du Fu, a great poet of the Tang Dynasty, expressed his feelings after viewing Zhang Xu's cursive calligraphy: "The sound of jade jade is moving, the scattered pines are straight, and the mountains are rolling in the middle, the desert is rising and the pen is strong." The strong emotions are like a mountain torrent, pouring down on the people. Zhang Xu's cursive writing gives his calligraphy works a strong artistic impact.
The reason why the art of calligraphy has this telepathic power is because emotion is the most important psychological content in calligraphy creation and aesthetics. Emotion and calligraphy lines have become interdependent sides in calligraphy creation. The rhythm of emotion It relies on the rhythm of lines to express, and the movement of lines is based on the rhythm of emotion as a necessary and sufficient psychological basis. Therefore, calligraphy has naturally become the visual art closest to human emotional activities. Just look at Yan Zhenqing's "Manuscript of Memorials to Nephew Ji Ming", Wang Xizhi's "Mourning Notes", and Su Shi's "Huangzhou Cold Food Poems", you can fully see or feel the rich and unpredictable characteristics, and all of them are From the richness and randomness of emotional rhythm, because the work is an extension of the writer's temperament, cultivation, and personality, calligraphy lines are ultimately the flow of the human soul. Since the Tang Dynasty calligrapher and calligraphy theorist Sun Guoting wrote in his In the famous book "Book of Calligraphy", after writing the famous saying "Emotional expressions capture the coquettish meaning", the art of calligraphy has made revealing the mysteries of the human emotional world its top priority.
However, in daily calligraphy creation, we must first master the basic skills of calligraphy expression, years of copying study, objective training, and highly clear rational habits often become obstacles to our emotional expression. People create consciousness. The contradiction between the budding desire and the strict rules and regulations has increasingly restricted the expression of the writer's emotions. Therefore, many excellent calligraphy works in history are often produced under the premise that when the writer writes, writing itself no longer becomes the main purpose. In the Tang Dynasty, when Yan Zhenqing drafted the "Manuscript of Memorial to Nephew", he was completely immersed in grief, indignation and passion, ignoring everything else. The rhythm of the lines unfolded with the rhythm of emotion. The two were intimate and integrated, and emotion followed the gate of will. collapse and jump in the black and white world.
Therefore, to truly enter the realm of what the ancients said is "calligraphy is a painting from the heart", it must depend on the author's ability to control lines and the degree of confrontation between emotion and reason. Sometimes it is also restricted by the objective situation. , Therefore, there are not many excellent works in the history of calligraphy that have the power to shake people's souls. This is the reason why. Only by letting reason merge into the torrent of sensibility can a masterpiece be produced that will be passed down through the ages.
Wang Maoxuan
"Horn Monthly European Edition October 2008"