My new passion - Chinese calligraphy. Not sure what I am going to do with it, but the poetry I have read doing this is intensely beautiful. So one day I will probably be a mediocre Chinese calligrapher. But I am sure it will bleed into my other art somehow.
None of this would be if not for the internet and pages like https://hanziyuan.net - https://www.yellowbridge.com - https://www.mdbg.net - https://ctext.org and many more (also Google translate sometimes). I have simply started to examine it and it is really a fascinating language in so many ways. I have really been nerding it since mid July.
My interest is mainly the written language, but I have also tried to do a daily Duolingo exercise even though the poems I have read are over 1000 years old.
I would say that this fascination started when my wife and I visited China on a trip with the Royal Academy of Art which I attended back in the nineties. But this time it was an exhibition my wife made a month ago where she asked me if I could make a big calligraphy. It was based on a poem by the poet Li Qingzhao.
When I got started I realised that I had to learn at least some of the language, learn the presentable Kǎishū (sort of the standard script as opposed to half-cursive and cursive script), learn the strokes. I have practised working with Chinese brushes all my life and know my way around it, so that has been my little head start, but it took me a month and a lot of paper to create one calligraphy that I was not at all happy with... here it is.
And then the real work started, because the poems I read, the language itself, and the Tang and Song art was simply too beautiful and interesting. So now I am at it. Every day I try to find time to write.
I suppose I will show some of my attempts here in the coming times, and explain a bit about the language and the calligraphy and all those other things I have discovered.