Calligraphy Every day is a good day | Higuchi Oyama 樋口尾山 | 1895-1987

Calligrapher Higuchi Oyama is not a Zen priest, but he was fascinated by the seemingly simple saying that many Zen priests calligraphed as a religious maxim. An immediately recognizable detail that we are dealing with a man who virtuously masters the art of calligraphy, but is not a priest, is revealed in the paper he chose. The paper has a fine, slightly relief-like pattern that one initially overlooks. The artist then deliberately chose a thin ink so that the decorative surface texture of the paper would become visible.

The calligraphy is not only artfully centered vertically, but the dimensions of the characters are also well-balanced. The third character 是 and the fourth characters 好, are large and elaborate, while the top and bottom characters,日, are small. As in corresponding Zen calligraphy, these two characters are written slightly differently. Both mean "day," but the first is essentially missing the lower crossbar—the middle stroke is instead slanted like the two parallel short strokes marked below it, which actually represent a repeating mark (instead of 日日, one writes 日々 ). Given this, the calligrapher writes the middle stroke of the first character at the same slant as the repeating marks below, and with this seemingly restless formulation, naturally intensifies the meaning of "every day" or "day after day."

In the end, however, Higuchi Oyama adheres to the canonical writing for 日, because this is where the entire sentence ends.