Western Calligraphy Tips

Video Transcript

"I want to talk to you a little bit about things that I'm going to advice you not to do, okay. If you're going to study calligraphy, one of the things that you should not do is compete with type. In other words, you don't want to end up with letters that looks so much like type that you might as well just use type. You want your letters to look like they're alive, which is something that type just can't do. It's got to come out of your hand so it's going to be possibly, slightly imperfect. But it's also going to look like a consciousness put it down there. You also need to know yourself well enough to know when you're starting to lose concentration, so you should stop before you lose concentration. There's another kind of stop that I'm going to talk about, which I think is like seriously important, okay. I know there are cybertrons out there, who have this tendency to think in terms of, "oh that's interesting, how can I do that on the computer"? This is not about how you can do this on the computer. This is going in the wrong direction. If you start, if you start thinking that way, you got to pick up the pen and do it, okay. If you keep thinking in terms of "how can I do this on the computer?", to my mind it's a lot like, you put a DVD and that you want to watch and then you fast forward to the end, okay. You've just lost everything in between that gives it value and gives it meaning. So that's an important thing. Don't fall into what the Buddhist call, "end-seeking". And then the last thing is, I don't recommend that you try to do Calligraphy while listening to music. It may work for you, but it doesn't for me. A mindfulness spell however, works great, and you can get one of those on the internet."