Word: brush
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pleasure in Water. Had the ancient Chinese developed their writing with quill instead of brush, it is unlikely that the immense treasure of Chinese painting would have evolved as it did. But for well over 3,000 years, painting and calligraphy developed hand in hand, raising virtuoso brushwork to such disciplined levels that generations of Chinese artists created their masterpieces "on fine silk that permitted no erasures...
...great lover of nature. Homesick for mountains, he one day ordered two of his painters to reproduce the scenery of the Kialing Valley. Artist Wu Tao-tzu went out to lie under the trees, listen to the murmuring streams. Then, having identified himself with the scene, he took his brush, dashed off One Hundred Miles of the Kialing River Valley in a single day. Artist Li Ssu-hsun, who was also a general in the Emperor's army, labored for long months to depict the same scene. Presented to the Emperor, both paintings were judged "excellent in the extreme...
...would become soiled. His painting pointed to a new direction. Originating a pointillist style of ink-splash dots (still known as "Mi-dots"), he produced in paintings like Auspicious Pines in the Spring Mountains China's first impressionist landscape. Its curious sugarloaf mountains are drawn in loosely applied brush strokes and washes, trees are carefully controlled blobs of ink. The human scale is merely suggested with the bare-bones outline of a lone pavilion...
...along with an absorption in technique for its own sake, art came perilously close to feeding upon itself. The famed three-volume painting primer called The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, compiled between 1679 and 1701 in a small Nanking house (called the Mustard Seed Garden), broke down brush strokes into 16 different categories. Beginning painters were expected to be proficient in each of them, ranging from "hemp fibers" and "ax cuts" to "horses' teeth" and "sesame seeds." But such variety, when carried out by artists with genius at their brush tips, produced some of the most sophisticated...
What about the statement of General Curtis LeMay, boss of the Strategic Air Command, that SAC is ready to put out brush-fire wars with nuclear weapons? Replied the President: SAC can be used wherever the Defense Department sends it. But "when you get a picture of the great Strategic Air Command charging all over the world for little police troubles, of course, that would be entirely wrong...