JOURNAL · IN THE MASTER'S WORDS
'Skilled' vs. 'Good': What Truly Makes Calligraphy Move Us
A 'good' hand is not the same as a 'skilled' one. It is the interplay of skill and beauty: even an unpolished hand can be beautiful when it lays the self utterly bare.
What is the difference between a “skilled” hand and a “good” hand in calligraphy?
It is often said, and I think of it as the interplay of skill (deft or clumsy) and beauty (beautiful or plain). A calligrapher’s hand may be deft yet so weighted toward technique that it moves no one. A “good” hand, by contrast, is beautiful even when unpolished. To give a recent example, the characters written by a person with a disability can be technically unrefined, yet they lay the self utterly bare — and there lies their goodness. The classics of calligraphy hold a great many works of exactly this kind.