Pictographic Chinese Calligraphy (23) Lyre, Chess, Calligraphy, and Painting - 琴棋书画

 Chinese respect people who are well educated, very knowledgeable, and scholarly. In the past thousands years, how well was a person at playing lyre, playing chess (here is the Go),  writing calligraphy, and painting has been the most popular standards. If you were good at these four, you were respected by the society, you could easily find a decent job and live in a good life.

 

Chinese put the four characters together as a proverb, or idiom - 琴棋書畫.  Let us see them one by one.

 

The big seal script for character Lyre is

Just like a lyre. 

 The small seal script of character Lyre is 

even more like the picture of a lyre.

How about character for Chess (Chinese Go)?

 

The shell bone script of character Chess is

on the top, it is Go pieces. Because it was made by wood, so use character 木（wood) to present the Go pieces.

The middle one is the box of Go pieces. The bottom are two hands holding the Go board and the Go pieces. 

The clerical script is

in which, the wood 木 right now on. The right top is the box, and bottom are two dots for two hands.

The third one character is Write or Writing, here means the skill of writing a calligraphy artwork 

 

 The top 

a hand holding a brush, the bottom 曰 is the characters on bamboo slip.

 

The fourth character is character Painting.

The small seal script of character Painting is

The top is a hand with fingers holding a brush, same as in character Write above. The bottom middle is a paper with some drawings，four lines around 田, should be wood bars to keep the paper from moving around when the brush pushing down on the paper.

 

Now, let’s see my artwork “Lyre, Chess, Calligraphy, and Painting” 

Created in 2016

Read from right to left, we have characters of Lyre, Chess (Go), Calligraphy (Write), and Painting, which a decent intellectual must be good at in China for 3000 years.