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Event Description
Calligraphy Workshop
There is an old saying in Japan - "Legendary Master Kobo (who was said the best in calligraphy writing) doesn't choose a brush", and that is supposed to mean you shouldn't blame your brush for your poor writing. But as we tried with several large brushes to write on long Washi paper, we concluded the Master Kobo must have chosen the brush. He was, after all, a very famous man and certainly should have been offered the best possible material available at that time. In comparison, the very fine large calligraphy brush our Onuma-san had was some 50 years old and accordingly it was about 70 dollars then. So you can imagine how much it could cost now. It shows Calligraphy, or simply the brush writing, became rather expensive hobby and the writing skill is no longer necessary in modern life in Japan. As a matter of fact, no one, in general I mean, would write letters with brush in these days, or you got to be rich to have the finest tool. So, that means we got to practice harder in order to be able to write well with whatever the brush available and affordable around here. With that tough goal in mind, the eight (8) members who participated today's workshop challenged the first writing of a New Year, Kakizome.
There is another old Japanese saying - "(Even) Master Kobo could make a mistake in writing", and amazingly, there is an English version of it - "Even (good) Homer sometimes nods". If history tells you even those legendary people did make mistakes, no wonder we could do so in Kanji at the last Kakizome. So we decided, probably we could blame our brush after all... As the year of "Monkey" started, I'm hoping, this year we would handle many things intelligently as well as have fun all together as a group, just like fun-loving intelligent monkeys. And we sure enjoyed today's workshop together thinking about who got a good brush.
Midori Shinye
Calligraphy Instructor
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