Brush, Ink, Paper, Stone - an Intro to Chinese Calligraphy

Free workshops for adults and teens in Wellfleet and Truro

Brush, Ink, Paper, Stone – Intro to Chinese Calligraphy

With the support of the Wellfleet and Truro Local Cultural Councils, Judith Motzkin, an artist based in Cambridge and Wellfleet, is offering four hands on sessions to introduce the origins, history and structure of the Chinese written language and to provide an opportunity to experience calligraphic writing with a brush and ink on rice paper. Motzkin says, “Outer cape residents have little exposure to Chinese culture. Insight into the language is a start to understanding, peace, and friendship between our two peoples.”
The Wellfleet sessions took place at the Wellfleet Library on Saturday, March 2, 2019. Session 1 for kids: 12:00-1:30. Session 2 for adults was on Sunday March 3:  2:00-3:30.

In Truro, the two workshops will take place at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill on Wednesday, April 17.  Adults 1:00-2:30 Teens and Adults 3:00-4:30.

Interested attendees can sign up at www.castlehill.org or email me at jmotzkin@gmail.com.

The workshop will include:

·       Cultural context: The Four Classical Arts, of which calligraphy is one and The Four Treasures of Chinese painting and calligraphy—stone, ink, brush, paper.

·       How to hold and use the brush to make expressive strokes. Care of the bamboo brushes.

·       Introduction of the Eight Basic Strokes used to paint bamboo as traditionally taught with the strokes in the character 永, yong, eternity.

·       Demonstration of the strokes learned as used to paint bamboo with ink on paper.

·       Practice on rice paper with ink to draw the early pictographs, write characters, paint bamboo

·       Examples of the progression from pictographs carved in oracle bones 4000 years ago, through the codification of the written language 2000 years ago.

·       Presentation of a few basic characters and how they are multiplied or combined with other characters to make new words and express concepts. Introduction to the radical/phonetic system.

The presenter, Judith Motzkin, has a degree in Asian Studies from Cornell University. A practicing studio artist in ceramic and mixed media, she continues her lifelong interest in Chinese culture, history and language through study and travel. In 2018, she taught Creative Practice/sculpture in Shanghai.

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Wellfleet and Truro Cultural Councils, local agencies  which are supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.

Christopher Volpe and Judith Motzkin at Castle Hill Truro Center for the Arts

Chris and I installed our show yesterday and we are pleased with the way our works meet. Opening Reception is Thursday 4-6. Truro Center for the Arts @CastleHill
Chris is showing Westerlies, a series of seascapes in oil paints and tar. 

The pieces in my installation, Gather and Sort, are made of clay, vintage scientific slide boxes and digital images. Pot shards, an inevitable and often discarded product of making pots, are tumbled with sand and water into smooth round forms, imitating geologic processes of weathering and erosion. Assembled over years, they are presented here in various states of chaos and imposed order, making reference to the persistence of pottery in human and archeologic history and the scientific practices of taxonomic organization.


The work speaks to the way we select, gather and make order and use of that which is collected. A stone is placed for the dead, a cairn to mark direction, a “sekimori-ishi” at the entrance to a meditation space of solitude. Just as we share the impulse to pick out stones on the beach, we are impelled to touch these curious objects. Please do.

“A Taxonomy of Sorts” comes from this natural impulse and the action of sorting these objects in the studio, giving them context. The work “...plays with the conventions of taxonomic cataloguing and storage in the natural sciences.”  In the work they “look like they’ve been sorted according to some kind of taxonomic logic, but in fact, they have been sorted by a shifting, undependable logic that is neither chance – decisions are specific and particular – nor rigor.”

“Stone Flow” refers to archaeological time and the slow movement of material from the earth, through the hand of the potter and back to the earth. As more work is made, more pots are lost in process, and more shards are added to create new iterations of this long term project. 

Out On a Limb in Pashchima Namarskar (reverse prayer)

From a series of Personal Challenges, this figure is in a posture that I approach with hope that someday I will get there, hands in prayer position between the shoulder blades,  just not yet...