Trecho do livro “Here to Go”, uma coleção de
entrevistas com Gysin escrito por Terry Wilson.
I first became interested in calligraphy when I was being taught Japanese in the army, during the war … and in the Japanese language school had a number of Japanese instructors, and as I was a painter and interested in painting, and in paint brushes, and in ink, uh, I learned quite quickly to understand some of the depth, not just simply for the purpose of recording the language, but the philosophy behind the attack that the brush makes onto paper, so forth and so on, the running of the ink and all those rather more abstruse meanings of Oriental calligraphy… but from the pictorial point of view it didn’t satisfy me because it hangs off the page; as you know, if you see lines of Japanese writing it hangs like vines, pinned at the top of the page and sort of dangling down at different lengths across, and not to my mind at that time satisfactorily employing the Occidental picture space, which is essentially a page as a picture is a page, or even as an icon is essentially a page, and, uh, when I went to Morocco I was immediately interested in the movement of Arab writing which goes, as Japanese does, from right to left, instead of ours does, left to right… but I saw that combing the two, as if one took a page and wrote Japanese from top to bottom and Arabic across it from right to left, formed a sort of gridwork which covered and integrated the picture space…
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