little talks on Traditional Chinese in Brush

Presented by www.chinese5art.com at 2010-2-21

As one of important tools in Chinese painting, the traditional Chinese Ink Brush may or may not known by most of foreigners, and sometimes I am quite surprise that those famous paintings was actually created by such an simple ink brush! Here at the moment I would like to talk little about Chinese Ink Brush.

 

The Chinese ink brush is mostly made of hairs of goat, rabbit or the weasel tail, because hair from these animals is soft and in good elasticity. Soaked in ink, it has what is known as “capillarity”, which combined with the strong ink permeability of a special Chinese paper, making the strokes in a calligraphic work more vivid, varied and pretty.

 

The use of the Chinese ink brush can be traced back to 6,000 years ago. Previously, the brush was made very simple. It seems that the picture, symbols and characters on ancient pottery, painted in red and black, were done with brush strokes.

 

The earliest brush intact today was found in a fifth century BC tomb of the State of Chu in 1958. A large number of inscriptions on bamboo strips were unearthed at the same time.

 

Since the fourth century in China, the skill of brush making saw great progress, and The Chinese ink brush became more suitable for calligraphers & Painter to bring their skills into full play. It had four features, summed up as follows: first, the tip of the brush could display the delicate changes of strokes. Second, its smooth end hair could make writing vigorous while it spread across the paper. Third, its cone shape made it easy to move in all directions. Fourth, it was durable, and kept is elasticity and softness longer. With such a brush, the calligrapher could easily write characters in different shapes, displaying different intensities and rhythms. By using different thicknesses of ink, the characters become three-dimensional.

The brushes from the province of Anhui, Jiangsu, Jiangxi and Henan are the most famous in the country. while The biggest one was made by a factory in Tianjin city in 1979. It is 157 cm long in total with the 20-cm long hair end, and it weighs as many as five kg. It is able to soak up one kg of ink. On the morning of September 14, 1979, calligrapher Yang Xuanting from Beijing wrote four characters meaning “Long Live the Motherland” on a piece Xuan paper 100 cm long and 150cm wide with this brush to celebrate the 30th founding anniversary of PCR China.

 

Size of ink brush is generally classified as either big (Da Kai), medium (Zhong Kai) or small (Xiao Kai); most calligraphy is written with a medium-sized brush as it is easy for beginers. The smallest brushes are normally used for writing very small pieces and for fashioning designs of seals. Medium brushes are the most widely used and accepted by public; wielded by a skilled artist, a medium brush can produce a variety of thicknesses of line, from those very thin to fairly thick. while finally the largest brushes are used only for very large pieces, such as calligraphy creations hung in the lobby of hotels.

 

For the texture of ink brush, it is usually produced to either soft (ruan hao), mixed (jian hao) or hard (ying hao), where certain textures are better in writing certain styles than others.

 

Traditional Chinese Ink Brush is a treasure in the history of China, and if you love Chinese culture or Chinese Fine Art, Ink Brush will be the one you will never ever miss.

Fine Chinese Art and Chinese Painting, Chinese Traditional Calligraphy