The Tale Of Calligraphers Essay

Yansel Herrera
Art History
Professor Morris
March 3rd
The Tale of Calligraphers
How are people inspired? Well for starters, we as humans are constantly acquiring knowledge and finding new influences. It can easily be said that every culture is influenced by other cultures. Influences can range from fine art, food and even fashion. The East is a big part of this movement, every day we see more and more of these modern influences and a simplistic approach towards how we live our everyday lives in the West.   Even in the contemporary art world the influences that combine Eastern and Western culture can be seen in art forms as widely varied as animation, installation art, and graphic art. The artists that will be discussed can, in one way or another, be connected to the Shinto belief. With this belief in mind, these artists having, varied styles of art forms, it can easily be tied into many historical Japanese traditions by finding the symbolic or even cultural connection in their artwork.
These connections can be found in the culture of Japanese artwork where the Shinto traditions developed their own belief in the “Way of the God”. The religious would constantly do rituals for purification and enlightenment that goes hand in hand with Buddhism. Moving on later in time, during the Kamakura period, storytelling was had to do with documenting the history of the Japanese culture. The The Tale of Genji is a novel written by Lady Murasaki about a heroic warrior, feuding clans, and violent death. The styles of the work change over time with Japanese calligraphers developing a new formal “…and somewhat angular scripts for official documents of the katakana and a very graceful and cursive scripts for personal and literary use” (Kampen 174). With this new style of calligraphy the scroll took on a different meaning of storytelling which reveals the event over time, not just giving the reader a shotgun blast about the story but understanding it in parts.   A good example of...