Crying Fowl

Greetings from Hong Kong !! I thought it would be interesting to lay down a couple of blogs while I am visiting Hong Kong, my birth place. Like a salmon returning to the river where it was born, I have followed the the scent of the water and my instincts and landed here a few days ago; not to mate, but to enrich my life cycle, I hope.

I am happy to say that I escaped the jurists' waste baskets and have gained my place at the Portland Open Studios tours again this year. I have decided that the majority of my new works would be in the Xuan-Boo style, and I have picked the heron as my entry piece.

This painting was done on fibrous Xuan paper. The sizing on this paper is a little bit different ( not as absorbent ) and the color presentation is not as deep and saturated as the normally sized Xuan. However when mated to canvas, the apparent texture it imparts is particularly suitable for our feathery friend here.

I am trying to keep the color scheme really simple here, after all I am not creating a document nor an accurate depiction of the bird. However the characterisation, the mannerism of the bird is vital. My mission is not to let color overrun my pictorial essay. The simple creature is then garnished with a few blades of leaves.

One of the challenges is to describe the feathers without actually drawing them out. I have allowed a controlled bleeding of strokes along the frontal side of the neck to give it that feathered look. A brief outline helps to define the physical structure.

Intersecting leaf blades is a real headache as far as composition and presentation goes in Chinese Brush Painting. I have placed a few drops of water at strategic points of the cluster so that ink disperses to a much larger extent along those fronts. This is not a blemish, but a controlled artistic technique, a la moss dots in many of the traditional works.

Finally, instead of allowing the background to be blank, I used a Mosaic of nondescript patches of colors. I find great similarity between this and a photograph with a shallow depth of field. Perhaps this is an instinct carried over from my hobby in photography.

I must mention that for this piece of work, I stretched my own canvas, and built my own frame for the canvas. My only debate right now is whether to finish the frame in the traditional black color, or to leave it as is, with the gray primer only.