Tuesday 30 December 2014

Calligraphy - The Art of Inscribe Words

Islamic art is generally reckoned to cover all of the visual arts produced in the lands where Muslims were an important, if not the most important, segment of society. Islamic art differs, therefore, from such other terms as Buddhist or Christian art, for it refers not only to the arts produced by or for the religion of Islam but to the arts of all Islamic cultures. Islamic art was not necessarily created by or for Muslims, for some Islamic art was made by Christian, Jewish, or even Hindu artists working for Muslim patrons, and some Islamic art was created for non Muslim patrons.

Calligraphy is more than ‘beautiful handwriting’ or ‘ornate lettering techniques.Calligraphy is the art of forming beautiful symbols by hand and arranging them well.It’s a set of skills and techniques for positioning and inscribing words so they show integrity, harmony, some sort of ancestry, rhythm and creative fire.

Calligraphy, or the art of writing, was the visual art form prized above all others in traditional China. The genres of painting and calligraphy emerged simultaneously, sharing identical tools namely, brush and ink. Yet calligraphy was revered as a fine art long before painting; indeed, it was not until the Song dynasty, when painting became closely allied with calligraphy in aim, form, and technique, that painting shed its status as mere craft and joined the higher ranks of the fine arts The elevated status of calligraphy reflects the importance of the word in China. This was a culture devoted to the power of the word. From the beginning, emperors asserted their authority for posterity as well as for the present by engraving their own pronouncements on mountain sides and on stone steles erected at outdoor sites.

The Classic Mongolian script written from the top downwards and in clockwise turns and has a classic vertical direction which expresses the almost optimal movement of handwriting due to the theory of probability. The Chinggis Khaan’s stele (inscribed Monument) which was writing around 1224 is an ancient memento, a memory at the same time as well as a monument and a very rare subject of research and studies regarding the Mongolian Calligraphy.

The development of sophisticated calligraphy as an importance art form is not unique to Islamic culture. Other examples include Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and illuminated bibles from north-west Europe including the famous Book of Kells. In the Islamic world, however, calligraphy has been used to a much greater extent and in astonishingly varied and imaginative ways, which have taken the written word far beyond pen and paper into all art forms and materials. For these reasons, calligraphy may be counted as a uniquely original feature of Islamic art.

Ottoman Turkish calligraphy is associated with geometric Islamic art on the walls and ceilings of mosques as well as on the page. Contemporary artists in the Islamic world draw on the heritage of calligraphy to use calligraphic inscriptions or abstractions in their work.The first of those to gain popularity was known as the Kufic script, which was angular, made of square and short horizontal strokes, long verticals, and bold, compact circles.

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