Way of the Brush. Fritz van Briessen

      THE LINE IS THE FIRST STEP IN ANY attempt to reproduce three-dimensional space on a flat surface. This line is rendered in Chinese painting by a stroke of the brush. There is a direct connection between the brushwork of painting and that of calligraphy. This has been stressed time and time again in China, and Western writers have often accepted this Chinese idea rather uncritically. Certainly in some lower forms of painting, and in some of the higher forms too, the connection is very close indeed. But in a host of forms in between the two extremes, the brushwork, together with all it implies, has undergone many changes. This is particularly true of paintings which achieve their pictorial effect not by using color but by breaking up the brush strokes.

      The idea of the reconciling of opposites, which permeates the whole field of Chinese painting, applies also to brush strokes. The expression chuan chih, which literally means "the bent and the straight," is sometimes used as a generic term for painting, for the bent and the straight are the linear means of creating spaces within which the tonal values of ink or color can be effective.

      The brush stroke is the first and the deciding step in all Chinese painting. One might even say that the first stroke of the brush decides the whole fate of a painting, for its style will be determined by whether the brush stroke is made with light or heavy ink, with a wet or dry brush, with an even or varying pressure of the hand, with a brush held perpendicularly or at an angle. It is not true, as most people suppose, that a brush stroke cannot be corrected; it can, especially if it has been done in light ink and with a dry brush. Nevertheless, this first brush stroke is presumably made with great deliberation and care, so that actually it is a decisive one.

      In applying brush to painting surface it is essential both that the artist be mentally prepared to execute the stroke without hesitation or thought and that he maintain complete control to the tipmost end of the stroke; these are axioms that derive from calligraphy. The brush stroke must have a precisely formed beginning (Fig. 4A), and if there is a tailing off, it must be controlled equally well (4B). The Chinese call the beginning and end of a stroke ch'u pi and ju pi, and the whole movement between must be executed with the same degree of discipline and precision as that shown by the stonemason in Chuang-tzu's parable or in Miyamoto Musashi's masterful painting "Bird on a High Branch" (Fig. 237), which provides an unusually clear example of continuous brush control throughout the execution of a stroke.

      Another rule taken over from calligraphy provides that a line whose direction is changed must be painted in the new direction with the other side of the tuft (Fig. 4c). This is to say that the tuft of the brush is tilted over with the change of direction, no matter whether the change be angular or rounded. To the novice this rule may seem unnecessary and pointless. But anyone who has steeped himself in the character of Chinese brushwork soon realizes that it is precisely on such seemingly trivial details that an essential part of the freshness, lightness, and skill of the brush technique depends.

      The theorists of Chinese painting have, during the course of centuries, evolved a nomenclature for a very large number of different strokes; that is, they have given names to all the varieties of lines which the masters have used. So we have names such as "iron wires" (Fig. 4D) and "lines like nails" (4B). One kind of line even carries the imaginative title of "nail-headed rat tail" (4E and 65). Lines may be executed with a dry brush (4F) or a wet one (4G), with continuously equal pressure (4 F-G) or with changing pressure (4H).

      It may be argued that the christening of lines is a matter for the critic rather than the painter, the primary function of such nomenclature being to communicate the phenomena of brush techniques in words. As a matter of fact, the painter who is interested only in painting generally pays little attention to such distinctions. And for this reason in this book these terms are used as sparingly as possible.

      Just as a sword stroke demands a special grip on the hilt, and an arrow shot demands a special co-ordination of finger, arm, and hand, so the brush stroke demands that the brush be held in a certain way. It is therefore essential to understand how the Chinese brush is held before one can grasp the techniques of painting. It must not be forgotten that Chinese characters were not originally written with a brush but were scratched onto bone or tortoise shell with tools of stone, bronze, or iron. Certain forms were developed from this method of writing which were definitely not intended for the brush. In course of time, however, the brush was evolved and came into its own in the writing of Chinese characters. If today the old seal writing or the early scratch writing from the period of the oracle bones is still sometimes reproduced by means of a brush, this is an anachronism which reveals nothing of the real qualities of the brush except perhaps its amazing versatility in the hands of an expert.

      The brush is held, not close to the tuft, but in the middle or even at the top of the handle, depending upon the size of strokes to be made. Only for the most detailed brushwork is the hand supported at the wrist; in all other cases it is unsupported and moves freely from the wrist.

      For the characteristic Chinese grip (Fig. 5), the brush is normally held perpendicular between thumb and index finger, with the middle finger also touching the brush somewhat behind and below the index finger, while the ring finger, in conjunction with the little finger, supports the brush from the opposite side. It is this combination of support from both sides that permits the artist to move the brush freely in all directions over the flat painting surface and at the same time to maintain constant and complete control over all its movements. Looking again for a moment at Fig. 5, one should note that the brush is being held in a position to produce rather long strokes; for shorter strokes the only difference would be that the brush would be gripped nearer the tuft. The middle finger is here concealed by the width of the brush. This picture, incidentally, comes from the so-called Ten Bamboos Studio, the Shih-chu-chai Shu-hua-p'u (The Repertory of Writing and Painting from the Ten Bamboos Studio), which was edited by Hu Cheng-yen between 1619 and 1627 and contains a great number of beautifully executed woodblock prints.

      The Chinese have always liked to think that their painting and its techniques developed without any outside influences. To say that this view is mistaken and that they in fact owe much to non-Chinese sources certainly does not in any way lessen the greatness of the Chinese achievement. The important thing is what the Chinese made of the ideas and techniques they adopted from other sources. No one can doubt that Chinese painting is among the greatest that the world has ever produced. And this all-important issue of the brush grip justifies the conclusion that we here find a purely Chinese development.

      I have a theory that there is a connection between the Chinese brush grip and that depicted, probably about the seventh century, in the so-called Painters' Cave at Kyzyl, in Turkestan (Fig. 6). Here the brush is held neither as the Europeans have long held their writing instruments nor yet in the Chinese manner. Instead, the grip is somewhere in between the two, but rather closer to the Chinese. Since, as we shall see in the next paragraph, there is good reason to believe the Chinese had developed their characteristic brush grip several centuries earlier, it seems likely that in these cave paintings we see a transition stage in brush technique resulting either from Chinese influences or perhaps from the fact that the painters, if actually of Chinese extraction themselves, were too far from China's artistic center to have progressed further.

      The painted tiles excavated at Lo-yang and now in the Boston Museum (Fig. 7) provide one of the earliest examples of Chinese painting, probably dating from the late second or early third century. In their extremely lively and expressive drawing we find many features that were to characterize later Chinese painting. The brushwork particularly is very highly developed for such an early period: the swell and fall of the individual brush strokes, the terminations of the strokes now