Using history and allegory to explore what lies beneath
I was teaching a client and friend the particulars of Asian brush work, how to draw and paint using the vocabulary of two intertwined forms of Chinese-based, Japanese painting,
suiboku-ga and haboku.
With my team, I put together an overview. Walking through these experiences, and personal history with this art of these forms. This walks back to my time with Lloyd Reynolds, a professor of literature, poetry and the graphic arts at Reed College. Underpinning all of his classes was a wide-ranging examination of art history—it’s relative to not only knowing the how of the work, but the why of its creation.
What could this possibly have to do with design, or branding?
It taught me to listen to people, my clients and colleagues.
It taught me to understand—“to inner-stand, to look and listen in-between” them to know more of where they stand. And knowing where people “stand,” it’s possible to verbalize and visualize solution pathways—how to answer questions, because, in the journey, you now know what lies beneath, another historical parlance at GIRVIN.
Emotionally, brands are made by people, built for people, so the intertwinement of desire, need and opportunity are playing the rhythm of the song to be sung, the story to be told,
the package to be conveyed.
This idea of inner exploration is deep to the work of design, brand strategy and marketing expressions. Know-in, know-well, speak the language and gather traction in these degrees of certainty.
And brushwork?
The fude, or Asian-style brush art particular to a wide variation in stroke character—a line can be diminutive, or broad, thin and wide and everything in-between that can convey delicacy and mass. This resilience in expression is like a great idea, it works as a small gesture, or a grand, global design program. It’s simple that flows expansively to the grander ideal.
Studying the spirit of the brush, the song, is a relevant aside.
As I’ve pointed out in other notes, the Chinese character for Ch’i, stands for “vital force,” which is a powerful exemplar in all of the most expressive attributes of Asian art.
You can see it here—“an altar with the four elements and the ’smoke’ of the offering, rising above in three gestures,” in our work, in “everythingness,” the holism of all creative acts—
it’s the deep underlying energy in.
Everything.
Horse brushwork
When one creates, it’s capturing this energy that is most crucial—the quintessential vitality; it’s not drafting the semblance, it’s gesturing the spirit that shall be the most long lasting, memorable impression. And it was Lloyd Reynolds that introduced me to this premise. Calligraphy and painting, in their “rhythmic vitality,” capture the essence in a gesture—and any strategist and designer can think of the implications in “what lies beneath” the work.
Walking that talk, here are a string of selected observations.
Where did the philosophy of this type of painting originate?
What is the core principle? It is about the stroke, but it’s also about the non-stroke, it’s what is there, and what is left untouched, it’s contemplatively contrastive:
the black, the white, the seen, and the unseen.
The nothingness, the everythingness came from teachers like these.
These precepts of quickly gestured ideas, or splashed ink, found new teachers—
from the Chinese “mad monks”—in similar teachers in Japan.
Which then crossed as an aesthetic principle in martial arts.
Think of the work as a journey, a philosophical ground that drives thinking and action.
Creativity becomes mindfulness, drafted with the brush, extended mind, inked flow.
Inspiration in mind, instinctive interpretation and movement.
Draw it out.
As a designer, brand strategist, draftsman, calligrapher, you draw from yourself, and your listening to come from the nothing of “not-knowing,” to what you do know in the journey ahead, what you can make of the then, and what to draw-out in the now.
Beauty can emerge.
Tim | Queen Anne Hill Studios | Strategic Magic
Girvin.com | Oseanstudios.com
