But at the Willows Senior Center on Lincoln Avenue, every Friday is a day to celebrate Chinese culture. For four years, the center has offered Chinese brush painting and calligraphy classes to seniors under the tutelage of Shirley Chen.

Over the years, Chen has developed a loyal student following, and one of those students is Ed Louie. He follows her throughout the week to five brush painting classes she teaches at various locations in San Jose. For Louie and his fellow students, Chinese brush painting and calligraphy have been a way to reconnect with their culture. For the non-Chinese students, it's been an opportunity to learn more about the ancient art.

What Louie and others find so exceptional about Chen is that she teaches her classes holistically. Beyond the fundamentals of the art—teaching the proper sitting posture while painting and the correct way to hold the brush—Chen teaches her students how to pronounce each Chinese character, the meaning of the word and even how the character developed from ancient pictographs.

Throughout her classes, Chen emphasizes the importance of chi, or energy, that flows from the painter's hand into the painted product. "We say energy is the chi because that's how the painting is alive," she says.

When Chen describes chi, it is as if she's describing balance as it's defined through the traditional Chinese symbol Yin and Yang. Both Chinese brush painting and calligraphy stem from the same brush usage, and the beauty of the piece is produced by the contrast of heavy and light ink and quick and slow brush strokes. The use of chi in this way, Chen says, is the difference between a trained calligrapher and an amateur.

In China, calligraphy and brush painting are well-honed arts. The Chinese can trace their art history back 7,000 years. The first written words in China were found on "oracle bones," which were animal bones inscribed with word pictures that a shaman would heat in a fire and use to forecast the future. By the fourth century A.D. calligraphy developed as an art, followed shortly thereafter by brush painting. Calligraphy was also highly prized during the imperial era, as a criteria to select members for the Chinese Imperial Court, because the art form demanded a great deal of skill.

In Chen's classes, the first challenge many of her students face is learning how to maneuver the brush, she says. Students use three brushes—soft, hard and a soft-hard combination brush. A student must learn how to use all five fingers to hold the brush straight as they keep their palm and wrist relaxed, enabling the fingers to have sufficient force.

Between classes, Chen leads the seniors in a series of exercises she learned in Hong Kong to the gentle sounds of musician Jiang Xiao-Qing with a CD given to her by Louie. Like tai chi, Louie says the exercises help bring up the chi. Chen says the slow, repetitive exercise is good for the back, knees, legs and balance, which is beneficial for students who have been sitting all day.

"She doesn't just teach you calligraphy, she teaches you culture," Willow Glen resident Karla Castello says.

Castello, like many other students, takes Chen's Chinese brush painting and calligraphy classes because the two are interrelated. In Chinese brush painting, every painting needs to be signed and dated in calligraphy. Bad handwriting, Chen says, brings down the value of the painting so many students also learn calligraphy.

Castello, who taught math at Yerba Buena High School before she retired several years ago, enjoys learning painting and calligraphy in a historical context and with other students from different cultures. "From one teacher to another, Shirley's great," Castello says.

Chen says her secret is to combine the traditional with the practical. Often, she has students utilize their painting and calligraphy skills to make gifts such as cards or framed artwork. She takes her students to a privately owned park in Modesto to paint lotus flowers, to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco to study the masters, and celebrate the Chinese New Year, which this year is on Feb. 9, with a classwide potluck.

"I want to make it fun and easy to learn," she says.

Following the Flow

Chen begins each of her classes with a demonstration and instructions. Wearing an Asian-style blue-and-white jacket, with a red scarf hanging loosely around her neck, Chen paints Chinese characters effortlessly onto yellow-and-red graph paper. As an overhead projector displays the image on the front wall, students practice the lesson from their seats.

Chen urges them on saying, "Gently touch and push, pause and push. Drop, drop, drop, drop. That's called ma."

Ma, she explains, means horse and is considered a positive and strong animal by the Chinese. "The brush tip just connects with the next brush stroke. This is cheng gong. That means success," Chen adds.

The students follow along, writing ma dao cheng gong, a popular Chinese idiom written on scrolls and given as gifts to new business owners.

"Using the horse as an analogy, the idiom means you start your business with strength and you arrive with success," says 65-year-old student Lindy Kwan, who follows the lesson with deliberate brush strokes.

Kwan sits in the center of the class, surrounded by various brushes and a tub of black ink. Kwan also has several folders filled with calligraphy he's done as practice at home.

For Kwan, calligraphy and brush painting have been a way to improve his fine motor skills after suffering from a stroke in 2001 that left him with a weak right side. His wife had been taking the classes for years and after the stroke, he decided to join the brush painting class.

It took several years for Kwan to start calligraphy. With his weak right side, calligraphy was a more coordinated effort than brush painting, which is freer in style. "It's helped me visualize something and paint it," Kwan says.

But Kwan is at an advantage. Having grown up in Singapore, Kwan is able to read and understand the language. Chen has nearly 20 students in her senior center classes who come from a variety of places in Asia that include Hong Kong, Canton, Japan and the Philippines.

Bin Yamamoto, a part-time De Anza College math professor, has been taking brush painting classes for six years. Four years ago, when Chen began teaching brush painting and calligraphy classes at the Willows, Yamamoto began studying under Chen.

As a natural extension of her brush painting, Yamamoto also studies calligraphy in Chen's class. She found it as a way to reconnect with the written form she experienced as a young child.

Growing up in the Philippines, Yamamoto studied Chinese at one of the local Chinese schools. Like other Chinese students growing up outside their native country, Chinese school was a normal part of there youth.

"When you're younger, you learn calligraphy in school but you hate it at the time," Yamamoto says.

Nowadays, Yamamoto is drawn to the precision and beauty of brush painting and calligraphy—a craft as delicate as the tools, where the thinness of the paper and unforgiving ink leave little room for mistakes. Often the painter has only one opportunity to create the piece.

Yamamoto has also dabbled in oils, and sees a vast divide between oil and Chinese brush painting. "It's not like oil painting, where if you make a mistake, you just keep adding color and adding color," she says.

Although modest about her paintings, Yamamoto has passed on some of her artwork to her children.

Angelo Kwok is another student whose roots are in the Asian culture. Although Chen's Chinese brush sessions are his first painting class experience, picking up the written language has been a fun challenge. "I'm picking it up after 30 years," he says.

Taking the class with his wife, Mina, brush painting and calligraphy has been a great retirement activity, he says. Kwok, who came from Hong Kong in 1968, said the classes are not only about building his painting skills, but also force him to focus.

"You have control, you become patient," he says. "It's really good."

Jumko Linafelter, who moved to Silicon Valley from Japan two years ago, agrees. "It's meditative, it really makes you calm," Linafelter says.

Linafelter says she was drawn to the classes to reconnect with Asian art. Although she is Japanese, some traditional Japanese characters are the same as the Chinese characters and the calligraphy techniques are similar.

But for non-native speakers, calligraphy is more difficult. "You don't know what you're writing; it takes a lot more concentration," Luis Juarez, 76, says.

While Chen instructs, Juarez has a cheat sheet to remember which order to paint the strokes. Occasionally, he takes calligraphy home to get help from his wife, who is Chinese. But overall, Juarez says he is satisfied with the class.

"It's relaxing and I meet people," he says. "It's mostly a way to spend an afternoon."

Complete expression

Connie Kwan, Lindy's wife, has learned in her four years of brush painting and calligraphy classes that there's more to Chinese art than properly holding a paintbrush. Chen, Connie says, tries to be a "complete artist."

"She tries to convey to us the whole idea of being a Chinese scholar," Connie says. "You have to be more than an artist, you have to be a scholar also."

According to Chen, there are four aspects of a Chinese scholar and good artist—brush painting, calligraphy that accompanies the brush painting, knowledge of literature to write on the painting, and the ability to carve a Chinese chop or seal that bears the name of the painter.

Chen's own background in calligraphy stems back to her school years growing up in Taiwan. Chen learned calligraphy and brush painting in elementary school, and by the time she was in high school, she had spent years studying the arts after school and during the summers.

In order to gain entrance to the National Taiwan Normal University as an art major, Chen had to pass university and painting entrance exams. She received the bulk of her training in Chinese art at the university and graduated in 1982.

In 1983, Chen moved with her husband to San Jose, and the family grew to include four children. In 1990, she began teaching part time and has since won numerous awards from the East Valley Artists Association and the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara. Along with the seniors and adult programs she teaches through the Metropolitan Education District and the East Side Adult Education Program, Chen teaches private lessons in her San Jose studio and at the Berryessa Chinese School. And with her help, some students have won national competitions in brush painting and calligraphy.

Chen's years of teaching have convinced her, that even though the initial learning curve is steep, calligraphy is for everyone. "If you have patience and stay with it, that's all you'll need," she says.

Shirley Chen teaches Chinese brush painting on Fridays from 8:45 to 10:15 a.m. and 10:30 to12:30 p.m. Chinese calligraphy classes are held on Fridays between ­-3 p.m. For more information, contact Willows Senior Center at 408.723.6450.