As I picked up my feet and placed one in front of the other, dodging the red dragonflies that had wandered into my path, I kept counting, almost audibly to myself, the numbers of switchbacks I had taken. It was a steep and steady climb, perhaps the grades were too much for my silvery brows, they were soaked. Breathe easy, I told myself. Stick your chest out, can't let other people see me panting like a dog. The sign said 11 switchbacks to the top, and I made only 4 so far.
The familiar lapping sound nudged me onwards.
As I closed the distance to the next turnaround, I felt the air charged exclusively with negative ions; there was this freshness that automatically invited my lungs to expand. Out of the corner of my eyes, just beyond my eyelashes, framed by the sentries of trees, a silver ribbon was fluttering downwards; flaunting a few pirouettes before it disappears behind he trees. As I looked upwards towards the sky, the flanking basalt walls were featureless against the sun, decorated with a golden hue around my vision field, exacerbated by my cholesterol deposits around my pupil.
So here I am, back to painting the Multnomah Falls again.
In this attempt, I shied away from using the Falls as my main character. Rather, I am using supporting characters to frame the subject. Thus I did not want to burden the Falls with exacting accounts, but to give it a mere "presence". A presence that is sonorous and delightful. I wanted to hear the choir through the pillars of the hall; I was not interested as much in the faces of the ensemble.
Obviously I stayed away from my past mistake of placing the Falls front and center. To "write" the trees, I decided to use the tried and true techniques of the more classical eras. The near ground trees/shrubs were done using the "outlined" method. I tried to impart different types of leaves to the woods to suggest a diverse vegetation. The shapes of the leaves need not bear resemblance to the real plants; these were products of rote learning. The emphasis was to have an assortment of trees and to be able to establish a spatial relationship of the bodies.
The "outlined" trunks and leaves transitioned to a "boneless" method of portraying for the more distant objects. This technique is used quite frequently in Chinese landscape paintings.
My design was to have a very dark outer ring of details to contrast the empty spaces ( the falls). In order that the darks are not too heavy and covered up details, I layered in my dark values on the back of the Xuan paper. I also wanted to leaves and trunks in the foreground to retain that translucent quality, so the colors were mixed with alum to give them more of a resist property. The tree trunks were meant to be empty spaces, to contrast them sharply with the dark background. Unfortunately the "dark side" was too intense and the "force" was not with me,so now they look tinted, which is still acceptable, albeit not what I had planned.
I had to go over the "outlines" a few times to revive the lines lest they get buried under all the stains. This "going over" is actually kind of a boo boo in Chinese brush painting. This is akin to "touching up" and it takes away the spontaneity and the expressiveness of the brush strokes. I really need to practice on my patience............ do a light outline, just enough to start the painting, and then finish with the dark brush strokes just once, as the final act.
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