Intro ~ Styles ~ People ~ Snippets ~ My Work ~ Other Sites
Now for the Present ... Regular Style
Intro ~ Styles ~ People ~ Snippets ~ My Work ~ Other Sites
Origins
Calligraphers being temperamental creatures, they have a habit of insisting on a Revelation before creating their masterpieces. Zhong Yao, the inventor of Regular Style, was no exception. He knew he absolutely had to read The Nine Forces Essay by Cai Yong. That's where the fun started.
The essay was owned by the ex-calligrapher Wei Dan, who flatly refused to part with it. He'd been traumatised by having to write a plaque for the Emperor (at 250 feet above sea-level!), and thereafter refused to promote the dangerous art of calligraphy.
Enraged by Wei Dan's refusal, Zhong Yao threw assorted fits, beating his breast so hard that he vomited blood. Fortunately, the Emperor cured him with a magic pill and he lived to become great and powerful. When Wei Dan died, Zhong Yao robbed his grave for the essay, and then gifted Chinese with Regular Style.
It looks like this ...
Regular Style is everywhere today: signboards, textbooks, computer screens. It's so familiar that it's hard for me to describe. I think of it as a no-nonsense style, clean and straight and matter-of-fact in its lines. Characters fit roughly into squares, and though strokes do vary in thickness, they don't swing and curve as much as Official Style.
Regular Style has more variations than I can count, but I'd be the first to admit that differences can be rather obscure without experience. Wei Bei (there will be an example here as soon as I feel up to wrestling with the scanner), for example, developed in the south. It's distinctive for its closeness to Official Style.
My personal favourite is Ouyang Xun, whose work appears alongside. The pieces below were also written by two great masters of Regular Style, Yan Zhenqing and Liu Gongquan respectively.
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Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker
