Southpaw

Have you  played Ping-Pong with a lefty and be victimized by the weird english?  Do you think pitching to a left handed hitter is the same as a right-hander?  Why does sinister mean left?  These are interesting questions to mull over.... until you are faced with it.

My former painting teacher once confided in me his frustration with a student.  He could not get the student to use the correct brush strokes, which is the foundation of Chinese brush painting.  It took me almost half an hour to coax my teacher to tell me that this student is left handed.  So what, you ask.

To those of you who have toyed with the Speedball nibs for calligraphy, you would understand that the natural right-handed slant of the pen, plus the nib's plane, makes the fine and thick lines of the alphabet . A left-hander would be unable to scribe these letters without turning the page 90 degrees to align the slant of the strokes with the slant of the nib.
As I ruminated on the implication of that awkward scenario, my first impression was that the brush should be exempt from that.  The brush possesses no rigid plane, thus it is free to script whatever it wants to.  There is nothing farther from the truth than this assumption.  If we take a look at my last blog; at the picture where it showed a transition from center tip to side tip as one writes a "7", this task is done with ease for a right handed person.  The brush would indeed assume a natural right slant, and we would move in the east-west axis to start out with.  For a left-hander, the brush assumes the opposite slant, and would be rubbing against the direction of travel, i.e. reverse tip.  The last blog "Ridgetop Explained" also suggested that the vertical "side tip" contour line describes the thickness of the object and thus for a right handed person, this is accomplished with flowing ease.  For a southpaw however, this is done against the orientation of the brush hair.  For a left-hander to do what we do, this person must turn the wrist completely inwards to cradle the brush, in order to achieve the same brush alignment  and slant  as the right handed person. 

(right handed body segments)

To better illustrate this point, I used the painting of a shrimp as an example.  The body of this arthropod is done with side-tip strokes;  as if drawing a fat arc, with the longer radius to the right. 
When I asked a left handed person to do this, the arc is painted with the opposite curvature, i.e. the longer radius now on the left side, despite the same body orientation.

(left-handed body segments)

I must say that I was ecstatic when I observed this.  It validated my theory, and vindicated the left handed persons.. ....... the teacher was frustrated because he did not understand the mechanics of the hand .. ...the student was frustrated because she was either blamed for not following directions, or was told to turn the paper upside down just to comply.

What is the remedy??  The southpaw should still learn the basics  and be able to execute the different brushstrokes, but also understand that most of the paintings that we take in are done by right handed people, with a right handed bias in their strokes.  My solution of teaching the southpaw is that as we learn from emulating the works of ancient masters, we could flip their works along the vertical axis.  Thus our right becomes their left !!    I am encouraging left handed people to digitally flip the masterpieces, and then learn to paint with the same strokes.  In essence, a center tip stroke that started from the left to right, turning downward and transitioning to a side-tip would now be a center tip stroke from right to left (aligning perfectly with the natural left handed slant), and transitioning to a side-tip down stroke. 

Confusing?  Only for a right-hander.  I think the southpaws know what I am talking about.

Ridgetop Explained

Now that I am done with the Portland Open Studio event and my son's wedding, I have a little more time to write my blogs. Having a student or two to teach has actually taught me a few things. The task at hand now is how to convey in a clear and succinct manner so there is an actual transfer of knowledge. We often harbor a notion, a concept that we somehow intrinsically know, but are unable to verbalize. Since so much emphasis in Chinese brush painting is placed upon Bi-Fa (method of the brush), the "don't do what I say, but do what I do" doctrine becomes an exercise in frustration.

Case in point, when painting rock formations, hilltops, mountain ridges, the beginners often copy the shapes without understanding the structure of the lines. It is not unusual for a range to look like a row of staples or horseshoes. I have sat in on classes where the instructor is unable to convey the concept of "contour" lines.

I am sure most of us have seen and understood what elevation lines represent. When we look at a topography map the elevation lines give us a description of the shape of the land. We know where the ridges and gullies are, and the relative steepness or flatness of the land. In painting a mountain range, we are just tilting the map on its side, so the elevation becomes not the height from the horizontal plane, but the distance to where we stand.

To illustrate my point, I've chiseled out a wooden block into the shape of

a mountain range. Now I have painted the " contour lines " on this block, and these lines describe the shape of the mountain ( as elevation lines describe the heights at different points on the map). When we paint these contour lines in succession, we are in effect transcribing the mountain range.

I have sliced through this block of wood into slabs to illustrate this point.  The more slabs I create, the more information I am able to draw ( i.e. more contour lines ), this is akin to having more "pixels", or watching a 1080p HD program vs. the 480 lines old programming.  The "chuen" lines that I have discussed  in the past i.e. hemp "chuen", is merely a sliver of such a slab; thus showing just a partial contour instead of the entire shape.  Therefore one can use a few strategic contour lines to describe the main shape of the range, and the "chuen" or "texture rubbing" lines to describe the minute details of the topography.

As we paint the lines with the Chinese brush, we are naturally in a "center tip" form as we traverse horizontally on paper, and as we turn the corner onto the vertical lines, the natural angle of inclination puts the brush in a "side-tip" mode automatically.  That part of the line describes "thickness" of the slab that we are painting, thus unknowingly giving a 3 dimensional appearance to what we have painted.

top photo is center tip( tip is aligned with direction of  travel

bottom picture is side-tip (tip is pointed at an angle to direction of travel)

Hopefully these little hints will help us attain a better understanding of Chinese landscape paintings.