This is the finished piece of the sketch from the last paint out. Let me begin by saying that I don't like the painting as a whole. I can't quite put my finger on it. Perhaps the frame needs to be wider to capture the grandiose feel of the Columbia River Gorge, ala a wide angle view. I was trying to make the foreground darker and present the effect of looking into brighter skies to show the depth and I failed miserably. It all has to do with my bad habit of laying down too heavy a stain to begin with. Patience is a virtue I must learn. The overall effect of the painting looks "dirty", the lines were not deliberate enough. I guess I have gone over these lines one too many times !!
But aside from that, let us look at other merits of the painting.
The cliff rocks showed up quite nicely with that 3-D effect. This was helped by the dark and dense vegetation around the rock formations. The branches and leaves on the fir were done with an old brush that had lost its point, and is perfect for this "split brush" technique. I had to go over the green parts quite a few times to give it the required color saturation, so that we know these are objects in the foreground.
The mist not only softened the harsh hill lines laid down initially, but it helped to create the meandering effect of the river. The gorge itself is very wide, but such a wide body of water would make the painting less interesting. Depth is achieved by the detailed depiction of the cliffs and the saturated color of the trees, contrasted by the lack of details on the distant hills.
I have moved the protruding rocky formation in the distance to the middle of the painting and made it darker so that it would give us a distant focal point to look at. I decided that the body of water was too bland, so a few sail boats/wind surfers were in order.
Chinese Brush Painting embodies the philosophy of the Ying and Yang, and in the Chinese lingo, it is coined the "Shu" and "Mi". "Shu" means vague, empty, light" and "Mi" means solid, heavy and real. In short, it demands contrast; the solid and real versus the vague and emptiness. The artist is judged not only by his/her skills in the brush strokes ( brush line and point quality, as in calligraphy), but also by how he/she manages the opposing forces, the dark/light, hard/soft, tall/short, motion/stillness etc. This sounds like mumbo jumbo to the un-initiated, but it is after all, a philosophy, a discipline.
Landscape paintings perhaps do not demand strict adherence to this philosophy as floral/birds paintings do, but somehow the artist still has to manifest it; if not in the whole painting, at least in each sub-groups of artifacts. Thus the distant rocky formation is darker than its surroundings, albeit a distance away and should be lighter. The two trees in the original draft now numbers 3 !! A third, faintly visible tree is added to balance the "Mi" with the "Shu". So within that group of 3 trees, there is a relationship, a differentiation of solid vs vague. The brush marks on the bottom of the trees are left not filled in, to contrast with the colored vegetation on the right. So, are the trees the on the same level of brush marks, or are they on a slope beyond the brush marks??
This is for you to figure out, or is this really important ?!
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