How Does an Expert Artist Create Artwork? Skills and Strategies of an Expert Calligrapher Utilizing Ecological Constraints

Abstract How does an artist utilize ecological constraints to create artwork? What physical skills support this creative process? This paper presents three studies examining the bottom-up creative process of an expert calligrapher over 16 trials, analyzing the same case from different perspectives. The first study focuses on the calligrapher’s writing posture. It reveals that the calligrapher synchronized trunk and brush tip movements, flexibly altering whole-body coordination patterns depending on character forms. The second study investigates the modification process of the 17 characters written on the paper. The calligrapher progressively adjusted the form and layout of characters by establishing coordinative structures among the variables of character form and position, thus effectively utilizing the margins of the paper. The third study examines the calligrapher’s gaze searches. It shows that these searches allowed accurate adjustments of character shapes and layout by flexibly changing gaze direction distribution depending on the position of the paper and characters relative to the body. Collectively, the three studies demonstrate that the expert calligrapher’s key skill is the flexibility to make bottom-up adjustments to characters’ form and layout by actively utilizing the ecological constraints of the paper. This skill is supported by flexible gaze searches and a writing posture involving whole-body coordination.