Stone, Paper, Scissors

I am going to delve more in depth with painting rock(stone) or hills(mountains).  I have discussed this topic briefly in my "Ridge top Explained" and I hope to use more illustrations to explain away the fear of tackling this discipline.

Hills and rocks are the backbones of Chinese landscape painting.  When we consult the bible of classical Chinese Brush Painting, the "Mustard Seed Garden", we would be told that to paint rocks(hills) we have to convey the 3 facets of the rock.  We have to demonstrate that the rock possesses energy(ambiance) to form the backbone of the universe.  The ability to express this quality depends on the artist's expertise in rendering the personality of the rock(hill, mountain).  Thus the Alps would flaunt the soaring chiseled lines that inspire awe, and the Appalachians with its soft and open embrace.  This blog however, is not to discuss how to depict the temperament of the landscape, but rather on how to physically render the lines of a rock(hill, mountain).  By the way, a lot of us who learned to paint the traditional way, learned by the method of rote, and our reference book is the Mustard Seed Garden.

In this art form of traditions, it is prescribed as to how to group together multitudes of rocks (or multitudes of hills, land masses).  It is suggested that aestheticism is attained  if these rules are followed.  Therefore when we paint 5 rocks, it would be most pleasing if we place them according to the bottom arrangement.

The MSG (Mustard Seed Garden..... not monosodium glutamate !!) also stipulates that the contour lines of the rocks(hills, mountains) should be done with stops and rests abundant.  The lines need to show variations in ink tones, speed and direction.  We then adorn the contour lines with "chuen" (rubbing technique, to describe texture) and shading, thus we are able to form the 3 facets of a rock, i.e. a 3 dimensional reveal of the landmass.

To have a clear conceptual picture of a rock(stone, hill, mountain) I used a stack of left over mat boards and cut them into the profile of a hill, hence the title Stone,Paper, Scissors.  As I found out these boards are too much of a match for ordinary scissors, so I cheated by using my Dremel.  Each piece of mat board now represents one slice of this landmass, and the aggregate stack of all these pieces gives you the 3 dimensional form.

  As I carved away with my Dremel, the straight edges represent the center tip strokes of the brush, and the beveled edge exemplifies the side tip stroke.  Thus the outline of each piece is analogous to the "contour line" that we shall paint, and the twist and turn of the cuts, mixed with the straight and beveled edges represent the requirement of varied speed, hesitation, center tip and side-tip strokes.

Now with this contraption,  I can stack these cut-outs in any fashion I wanted  to acquire the desired morphology of the land mass.

By placing a piece of paper ( I used a hardy typing paper instead of the flimsy Xuan) against this stack and rubbing it with charcoal or crayon or just a pencil in this case, I transferred the profile of this structure onto the paper.  Each line that is transcribed represents a "contour line" of our make believe rock(hill).

By selectively erasing all or part of these "contour lines" we now have a drawing that is made up of   longer, more complete "contour lines" that describes the profile, and short, broken lines (which are remnants of the original "contour lines") now helping to highlight or accentuate the characteristics of the mass, and these now become our "chuen lines".

I shall now go over these pencil markings with ink and brush and the resulting image is more reminiscent of what we see in traditional Chinese landscape painting.

The preceding is an attempt to dissect the construction of all the lines that make up a rock(hill, mountain) and to entertain the relationship of "contour line" and "chuen line" when applied to the subject matter.  Obviously we do not paint this way, but this is a good tool for forming a mental image of what we are trying to accomplish on paper.  Thus for the novice, the brush strokes have at least a purpose and methodology to it, hence Bi-Fa.  And of course for the viewer, a better comprehension of what is involved.