I painted a lone horse last time. Time to paint a few of them together.
I started out with a horse leaning in on a turn,
Painting is playtime for me. I try not to take it too seriously since my livelihood is not dependent on it. It has always been an exercise of exploration and fun with occasional frustration mixed in.
Recently I harvested a spaghetti squash, which is known as Shark-fin-squash where I grew up. Instead of turning to mush like pumpkin when cooked, this squash has flesh with distinct filaments. The strands look like spaghetti, hence the name; or like strands of shark fin used in shark fin soup. The squash itself has a delicate sweet taste to it and is quite refreshing, unlike the over-the-top, decadent shark fin soup. I halved the squash, scraped off the seeds and boiled the squash to soften the flesh. After the softened flesh was scooped out and set aside for cooking, I was left with the tough skin of the squash.
Normally I would have put the skin, or the shell of the squash in the compost to feed a new generation of plants but I felt a sudden urge to play with them this time.
I wanted to do some calligraphy on them.
I did not anticipate the difficulties that were presented. First off I just picked a brush that was laying around, which was not particularly suitable for calligraphy. The most challenging part was the fact that the surface was not flat, it was dome shaped. Unlike writing on a piece of flat paper, it was difficult to maintain a proper angle between the brush and the squash. The result were a lot of glancing blows where a proper brush tip was impossible to maintain and I wasn't able to control the nudging and pressing of the brush. I subsequently changed to a brush that I use for calligraphy (small piece on the left),
I was stunned, shocked, embroiled in total disbelief at a recent art show.
The piece of "art" that claimed First Place was a portable beach chair with a canopy, wrapped in aluminum foil and some colored fabric along with a seat cushion.
It was vague to me what won the honor of a first place finish; the contraption itself or the photo that was displayed behind it.
This piece of "art" was a comment on global warming and rising sea levels, as the artist sat on this man-made piece of junk, mostly wrapped in non-biodegradable fabric and plastic and perhaps adding to the microplastic dilemma Which brings to mind a famous outbound motor company tried to merchandise their motor with a filter that captures microplastic particles as cooling water circulates the engine. The sell was that while boaters are running their motors they are helping to remove microplastic contaminants from waterways. The question that begs to be answered is what the consumer does with the used filters. The flimsy lawn chair is so trivial that begs the question: why even buy it in the first place. To help the GDP of some poor country I assume. Who knows, the artist might have picked it up at some recycling facility or might have re-purposed a piece of garbage that was found. I was too quick to judge. Sorry!
I get it that a lot of galleries and artists alike are answering to the clarion call of social and environmental issues to stay relevant. I don’t have a problem with that. But when the open call was not based on such themes and somehow such pieces popped up as winners then the verdicts were less than cogent. In fact it trivialized a good cause.
The point was that I felt absolutely resoundingly stupid. I failed to see the "art" aspect of the whole thing. It was a political statement perhaps, under the guise of environmental art that examines climate change in the context of human activities and global responsibilities.
This sort of reminded me of another First Prize winner at a local art show. It was a tent show and the adjudicator was the city mayor. A cropped photo of a raised fist captured that honor. It was a photograph with intrinsically bad quality. This was the time during a lot of social unrest and racial inequality issues. Again a feel good piece. A political statement. But "art", hell no !
A quick search on the web with words like "weird art", "absurd art" brings up hoards of examples of how dysfunctional some of these "art" insiders or authorities can become.
Artist's Feces is a piece by Piero Manzoni and was purported to be a satirical comment of the convoluted obsession with celebrities. Imagine paying good money to buy someone's gaga. Not for medicinal purpose as in fecal microbiota transplantation. That is done to help restore the microbiome.
Spatial Concept is a piece of red canvas with a knife slit in it. The artist Lucio Fontana claimed that his work abolished the traditional framework where the canvas was supposed to be painted on. By putting a knife through it, he freed himself from the shackles of art.
Who can forget about the banana duct-taped to a wall. The piece Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan insisted that the artist broke status quo in meaningful, irrelevant and controversial ways. Some fool paid 6 million dollars to help him destroy that status quo. I suppose I would have deemed those 6,000,000 bucks very meaningful if I was Mr. Cattelan.
So what is my beef! I’ve certainly stepped on a lot of toes.
Sour grapes? Perhaps!
But sorry, I just don't get it. Really.
Convinced that sketching was what made Xu Beihong's horses look so distinctive and exact, muscles bulging and tendons tensing I decided to follow suite.
How crass!
I picked out a photo of a horse and I sketched it out in charcoal. Paying attention to the nostrils, mouth, chest muscles and joints and tendons. Cute!
The rest was easy. Using my brush and ink I finished my horse in no time.
It was almost midnight.
I should be climbing into my bed. Not because I was afraid to turn into a pumpkin, but I just wanted to have a good showing on my Apple Health app to say that I had healthy sleep habits.
But I'm a night owl. Somehow I was reluctant to let the day go. So I continued to scroll through songs on my music streaming device. Any excuse to clutch the waning day.
Then an album cover turned up, a lady's headshot.
For some reason I was so enamored with her image, I had to paint her; immediately.
Perhaps I had been studying Xu Beihong and his studies with sketching and what not, I instinctively grabbed my charcoal and started to sketch on Xuan paper. I filled in the grayscale values with my brush wash which I didn’t empty from the day before, which was basically very diluted ink. Her hair reminded me of the tail and mane on a horse, brushstroke-wise. I had no training per se in painting portraits but that didn't stop me. I was on a whim.
By the time the painting was done, it was already a new day. I just left the painting as it was and went to bed satisfied, like a child having received a new toy.
I decided to take a closer look at what I had done the night before. I examined it in the daylight.
I tried to rescue or hide my mistakes by draping her hair closer t the face to conceal the brow and lip, and re-shaping one of her nostrils.
Since my iPad came with certain artistic brushstrokes, I thought I gave it a try.
Combed her hair a bit, less wild, and a backlit highlight effect,
When I toyed with painting horses a few months back, I was serious about it; more than an whimsical fleeting infatuation anyways. I thought about how da Vinci studied musculature anatomy of humans in order to better his portrayal of the homo sapiens species. So I sought reference in the equine muscle diagrams.
Then I realized that wasn't the whole story. The well developed shoulder muscles and the bulky rump are tied to skinny, bony legs. Horses are unlike pigs or rhinos that position themselves on stubby appendages. Unless they are draft horses ? These bony legs help to personify the agility of the horse.
Not that long ago it was NBA playoff time. A lot of these elite athletes have skinny, bony legs. I would have guessed that they have bulging calf muscles. But then when I see some of these players wrapping their legs due to calf injuries I realized that what makes a person jump is more than the calf muscle. Amongst other things, it also requires the Achilles tendon pulling on the heel bone to springboard off the ground. There is a multiplying of amplitude advantage when one considers the foot as a lever, with the fulcrum set at the ankle. For everything to work, the muscle has to contract and the tendon has to pull. Of course there's no free lunch. The trade off for amplified flexion is that the muscles are required to contract harder and the ligament and tendon pulling tighter. A pulley system is just the opposite, it attains the mechanical advantage of lifting heavy weights by making us pull a lot of ropes. The picture I get in my head is the handbrake cable on my bicycle. When I squeeze my brake lever, a steel cable inside a plastic tube slides accordingly and pulls on the brake calipers. All hell breaks loose when the cable breaks, or when the plastic tubing gets split open or dislodged, allowing the cable to be squirrelly to the plastic conduit and not translate the force. Wrapping the leg helps to keep everything in place.
Then Halliburton of the Indiana Pacers suffered a season ending injury on the final game of the NBA playoffs. His cable broke and the lever could not be actuated. He was left face down on the court in total agony.
Horses have spindly looking legs for a different reason.
What one would normally consider or assume as the leg is actually the foot ( the metatarsal ). A very long foot. The front leg, or hand if you will, is represented by the long metacarpal. Horses have modified toes ( pastern bones ) and they are on their hoofs all the time. I suppose that's where the term "be on your toes" comes from.
I've been given a few opportunities lately to show people how to paint with a Chinese brush. I was apprehensive at first about shouldering such a responsibility. It was going to take time away from me twiddling my thumbs. I had better use for my time! Then I was timorous about my own inadequacy. I did not want to be branded as a dilettante. I eventually placated myself that my job was to offer my knowledge as a coach and not how well I could do it as a player.
The fundamentals of using a Chinese round brush is in mastering the brush tip within the brushstroke. Hence center-tip and side-tip. Such techniques can best be seen in paintings of bamboo.
A bamboo painting by Shi Tao (1642-1707)
Bamboo is also symbolic for being a good citizen. Bamboo is stiff, yet flexible. It is difficult to break a bamboo. Bamboo is a symbol for humility, because it is hollow in the center. The bamboo represents integrity, as the word for the "node" in a bamboo is a homonym for the word "integrity" in the Chinese language. Bamboo branches out only at the nodes, thus a mature bamboo plant shows distinct layers of leaves, resembling rungs of a ladder. Hence the bamboo teaches us to shelter and nurture those who are below us, allowing them to grow as well. My mentor encouraged us to paint bamboo with reverence to the virtues of the bamboo. Then I had a student painted a Christmas card with the bamboo as a wreath. Definitely couldn't fault the originality, but there was a cultural disconnect somewhere.
Rungs of leaves on bamboo plants,
