Analysis on Formal Beauty of Chinese Calligraphy from the Viewpoint of Composition

Abstract

Chinese characters compose of more or less strokes that follow certain rules and formal beauty principles. This paper analyzed Chinese characters' formal beauty mainly according to the principles of formal beauty composition, including unity and change, contrast and consonance, symmetry and balance, rhythm and rhyme, proportion and segmentation, to conclude that the art of calligraphy has not only the formal beauty but also aesthetic sense factors of more features that is the beauty of artistic conception worth our exploration, so as to find our own method of graphic design. Keywords—composition; formal beauty; art of calligraphy I. INTRODUCTION Art of calligraphy is the essence of Chinese traditional culture, and its beauty can be summarized as the trinity of and meaning. Mr. Lux un said that the beauty of shape is intended to please a sense of eyes, the beauty of tone to please the sense of ears and the beauty of meaning to please the sense of hearts, by which the beauty of Chinese characters is vividly summarized. Since ancient times, many calligraphers have interpreted the rules of art of calligraphy from different viewpoints, such as style of writing, bulk structure, art of composition, use method of ink and water, while we as a generation of accepting modern Western design education, would like to discuss the beauty of calligraphic composition in the viewpoint of modern composition. word of composition originates from the Bauhaus School of Design in Germany, De Stijl in Dutch and Russian Constructivism, who made exploration of design language and design education to adapt to the industrial design and made continuous improvement constant for many years, brining influence in the world. They discussed and researched all elements separately in design, including plane composition, color composition, three-dimensional composition that is the composition of shape, th e composition of color composition and the composition of body, so it is very clear that for the composition of body, we need not only study on shape and color but also space, dimensions and material. Since calligraphy is the artistic form of plane two-dimensional space, we will not discuss the three-dimensional configuration, and focus on the discussion on the beauty of shape, the beauty of color and the beauty of tone in the composition of calligraphy. For the composition of shape, we mainly study the relationship between two or more shapes in the two- dimensional space and then make a recombination according to certain rules of formal beauty to get a new and beautiful composition. What a composition can achieve the formal beauty, for which we first decompose all the elements into the smallest element unit, for any shape can be summarized as point, line, surface, and we recompose these most basic elements in a certain form to produce new picture. Calligraphy is the art of line, for which we also make study on the composition relationships among various strokes including long and short strokes and large and small strokes. strokes of Chinese characters can be divided into eight kinds of strokes of points, horizontal stroke , vertical stroke , left-falling stroke, right-falling stroke , rising stroke, turning stroke, and the eight basic strokes can be combined into thousands of different fonts for their differences in position, quantity and direction. According to statistics, there are 57,000 Chinese characters are collected in The Grand Dictionary of Chinese Characters , of which each Chinese character is a complete and independent individual, and when they are compiled in an article, they become the individual in the whole. It is necessary for us to study the composition relation of Chinese characters, and now we make an attempt to analyze the composition relation according to the rules of formal beauty in composition..