The Cursive Styles - Of Walking in Grass

Apologies

The cursive styles are terribly important for calligraphers to know. However, I'm afraid that I can't say much about them. You see, as they require a high level of control and maturity of style, most teachers advise beginners to go easy on them, and so I'm pitifully ignorant of specifics here. Many thanks to Dr Pei, who has given me permission to use these pictures from his China the Beautiful. Here goes!

Walking Style and Grass Style

While Walking Style is more or less equivalent to English cursive, Grass Style is a little different. Walking Style is when strokes are joined up and frequently merged, and some short forms are used. Grass Style appears to have a totally different set of characters from normal, and it utilizes short forms fanatically. It's often so joined-up that it looks like one long, twirling ribbon. My rule of thumb in identifying a piece as either is, if it's completely illegible, it's Grass Style. You will have guessed that the piece on the right is a prime example of Grass Style.

Almost all notable calligraphers have been expert in this area. The greatest calligrapher in this field is generally accepted to be Wang Xizhi. There are hundreds of others I'm quite incapable of naming.

Note that there are two flavours of Grass Style. Zhang Cao is based on Official Style. It's flatter and retains Official Style's characteristic swallow's tails. The Grass Style examples on this page are Jin Cao, based on Regular Style, which is more popular.

It looks like this ...

The cursive styles give a calligrapher enormous potential for experimentation. Calligraphy really becomes an abstract art here, because joining up strokes is a highly subjective thing. In fact, so many variants of characters are possible that it's not considered good form to use the same variant twice in one piece.

The piece on the left is by Mi Fei, a.k.a. Crazy Mi. You can tell it was executed with speed and spirit -- note how the strokes seem to flow from one another. Also, characters vary somewhat in weight. This piece doesn't use short forms, but it does include shortcuts. Mi Fei circled the 5th character (from the top right-hand corner), rather than bothering to write a rectangle-shaped kou around it.

If you've seen printed Chinese, though, you'll realise that this piece isn't totally illegible. Complicated characters are rendered with practically all their strokes intact. So it's Walking Style, rather than Grass Style.

Sometimes, a style doesn't fit tidily into a category. When in doubt, we combine the names of two styles. This piece by Dong Qicang is slightly cursive, but ignorant boors like me can still make it out quite easily. So let's call it Walking/Regular style. In case you were wondering, the heading of this page was written by Zhao Mengfu, and it also comes under this title.

Visit Dr Pei's China the Beautiful to view and find out more about cursive style.

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