With the advent of the digital, writing has quickly become practiced electronically with the tapping of keyboards. This is to improve legibility and ease of communication. But while writing was primarily developed to facilitate communication between people, early civilizations also recognized it as an artform with inherent beauty in the structure and formation of its characters. And thus, was born calligraphy.
Calligraphy is suspected to have originated in China. However, it was practiced all over the world in different cultures, and each of these cultures developed their own distinct calligraphy styles according to what the culture found aesthetic and the meaning they prescribed to the practice. But what was common to all ancient calligraphy was that they used specific tools to practice the artform.
The calligrapher’s toolset included pens, brushes, ink, paper, a template, and lightboxes. The pen was traditionally either flat- or round-nibbed and used for defined lines, such as the ones found in Arabic and western calligraphy. For broader and less-defined strokes, or if you practice the Chinese and Japanese style of calligraphy, a brush was used. The ink used in calligraphy is usually water-based and less viscous than oil-based inks.
The paper is highly porous to allow for cleaner lines, and lightboxes and templates are used to achieve straight lines without the help of pencil markings. But you don’t need to adhere to such strict standards nowadays. Just go down to your local stationery store and pick up a regular gel or ballpoint pen and some cardstock paper to practice your calligraphy in style.
Culture And Calligraphy
Calligraphy is deeply intertwined with concepts of beauty and aestheticism. After all, the entire point of calligraphy was to transform the simple, and crude, act of writing simply for legibility into an artform that celebrated the beauty of writing. As such, each culture’s version of calligraphy has a distinct look.
Western Calligraphy
Western calligraphy is influenced by Ancient Greece’s notions of beauty. The fifth century Greek sculptor Polykleitos claimed beauty to be a product of symmetry. He believed that the proportion of one part to another was what lay at the root of beauty. Thus arose the practice of designing the very alphabet in alignment with proportionality.
Afterward, thousands of manuscripts were produced in many different distinct hands—from Celtic to Blackletter to Rotunda and many more. Some of these were developed in the service of religion and beautifying religious texts, whereas others were created specifically for their aestheticism. The styles developed here later became the basis for typography and printed letters.
Arabic Calligraphy
Arabic calligraphy too relies on the concept of proportion. Ali Ibn Muqla, a vizier in Baghdad, composed a system of proportions for the Arabic script. It was his concept that allowed the script to develop as it did and extend formal structural thinking even to cursive shapes. Arabic calligraphy is also closely associated with Islam and the worship of Allah.
Calligraphy in Islamic art is venerated as a link between Islam and the language of Muslims. This is because the holy book of Islam, the Qur’an, contained many passages and proverbs which were taken as sources of inspiration for Islamic calligraphy. Islamic calligraphy is especially valued by Muslims as they believe that only Allah can create people and animals as images and thus, calligraphy was an appropriate representation of the beauty of Allah’s creations without directly depicting them.
Brush Calligraphy
However, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy has a vastly different set of considerations. In these cultures, what is considered beautiful is balance rather than proportionality. There was less emphasis on replicating individual units and creating a sense of uniformity across the page. East Asian calligraphy focused on the overall appearance of the composition, and this led to a different lens of viewing calligraphy from that of western or Arabic practices.
Characters used in the Chinese and Japanese (and many other East Asian cultures) script are diverse in structure; some are complex while others are relatively simple. This variance means that certain characters would require more space around them, and have different scale or weight between forms. Furthermore, the calligrapher has to pay close attention to the tone and density of ink across the composition to evaluate the beauty of the overall composition.
Brush calligraphy was also considered similar to performance. How the caligrapher produces the composition is just as important as what it looks like. Each character is written as a flowing sequence, and this leaves a record of the calligrapher’s movement across the page in ink which the viewer can enjoy.
Calligraphy is more than just beautiful writing. It is an artform that imbues principles of beauty and aestheticism into written form. It is a reflection of the beliefs of its culture, such as how Arabic calligraphy is closely associated with Islam and how brush calligraphy seems to reflect collectivist sentiments. As such, the practice of calligraphy is a gateway to culture.