Bit off more than I could chew

Winter is here.

Trees are shedding their leaves.

For more reason I love a naked tree more than one with full foliage.  I think I enjoy the intricacy and the stubbornness of the branches.

I've attempted branches before, so why don't I try roots.

Banyan tree roots to be exact.  Full, intertwined, entangled; yet each branch leads to something, somewhere.
Like capillaries in our body.

I sensed this is a daunting task.  How to make sense of a senseless mess.  Yet my OCD beckoned.  How else could I enjoy the obsession of  repetitive work without regret!

I wanted to paint this in black and white.  I've grown really fond of this setup.  It appealed to me at a visceral level, one that I could not verbalize.

It didn't take me long to realize that I was in deep trouble.  I was losing sight of what I was painting, or for that matter, what image was in my head.

I started out by thinking that I would paint the roots as negative spaces against a dark, sumptuous background.  That took too much planning.  It wasn't natural.  So I abandoned.

Then I tried to paint the roots using a light ink, filling in the non-roots areas later with  darker ink.  My lack of patience got the better of me.  I simply could not wait for the visual effect to materialize.  I had problem envisioning the painting.  I wanted to throw my brush against the wall.

So I resorted to my tried and true method of sketching.  I took time sketching out the roots using charcoal; developing each lead.  I then developed the painting by addressing which area should be filled in or not.  It wasn't as easy as I had planned because I was soon immersed in this jungle of lines.

On top of that, the painting looked more like an illustration than a painting.  There was something amiss about it.

So I went back to my other method.  I just dived into a new sheet of Xuan and started to paint.  Again I was confused about my positive and negative spaces.... which I subsequently said "the hell with it".  Once I decided that I didn't care, and perhaps aided by the recent attempt of sketching with charcoal, I seemed to be able to fuse the positive and negative spaces together and make some sense of the composition.

 I forged on until I had all the spaces accounted for.  Often times the positive space tuned into negative space and vice versa.  I did it without much thought; I just went along.

This is how the draft looked like after the ink has dried.

My next move is to work on the details with regards to my ink values.  I am still vacillating between my charcoal sketched  version and the purely brush version.  I promise myself to be patient.  I shall wait for another day.

Obviously I've bitten off more than I could chew.

Shi Tao Revisited

I mentioned that I was not pleased with my rendition of the flat tops in my emulation.  I sensed there was something wrong and I was disappointed at myself that I just brushed over it (pun intended).  What was the haste?

The reason my flat tops looked awkward was because I ignored the minute breaks in the lines.  I had dealt with this subject matter in my blog More Than Just Broken Lines dated 3/29/2012.  In that blog, I surmised that the breaks in a line are often used to create distance, depth.  When these gaps are strategically placed,  an illusion of 3-dimensional thickness is created.

When I painted the flat tops, I painted the parameter line as a continuous, non-broken line.  Thus it was boring and two dimensional, despite the presence of vertical ch'uen lines denoting a folding feature in the land mass, i.e. a raised ridge or slope of sorts.  I magnified the original print of Shi Tao's landscape and was delighted about my observation.

In the above cut-out, one could see a break in the line at where the fold could occur.

Here I have an example of another ancient Chinese brush painter whose name escaped me, but his technique of using the gap was even more astute and deliberate.

While examining Shi Tao's painting I also noticed evidence of light markings underneath the darker ink.  He sketched his paintings.  The practise of sketching had at times become a contentious issue with me, at least during my encounter with various teachers.  Some of my teachers are staunch objectors to sketching; they deem that a sign of incompetence.  Whereas I had teachers who advocated sketching, regardless of whether one was doing brush work or not, especially in laying out a landscape painting.

Armed with this knowledge, I made another attempt in Shi Tao's landscape painting.  This time I sketched it out in charcoal first.

After the sketching is done, I went over the charcoal lines with my brush work.  I must say this allowed me to control my brush tip much better.  I could devote more attention to the quality of the lines, since I didn't have to be too concerned about placement of shapes.

In my once over with light ink brush work, I was paying special attention to the breaks in the lines when I got to painting the flat tops.

As usual I filled in my ch'uen lines and shading whenever the brush was in the right condition to do so.

This was followed by my blues.  After that I took a day off, which I shouldn't have done.

The reason I regretted taking the day off was because I had allowed the blue to totally dry, thus it would not bleed into the browns, forming hard, artificial boundaries between the different colors.  I found the lack of transition unpleasant to look at.  I should have known better!  Is this what people refer to as wet on wet technique?

I paid better attention to the round leaves too by using better brushstrokes and using side-tip strokes on one side to denote thickness/shadow, allowing a more 3-dimensional appearance.

With the mixed foliage, I tried to paint in the under layers with light ink first to give an impression of a fuller tree.

A wash with brush cleaning bath was applied to blend the colors.

After the final wash is dried

The first and second attempts side by side

The two works have a different color cast, mainly due to the different time of the day when the photo was taken. The one on the right is the second attempt.  It shows better articulation of the flat tops, as it should be; that was my motivation for this second edition.    It turned out that there is an additional flat top on the right that I didn't catch during the first attempt, and the little water level drop  right next to the red round leaves that I omitted is now added back in.  Obviously more ch'uen lines, albeit in disarray they seem.   I need to hone my skills in having a rich field of lines without making them look  like a wad of jumbled  noodles.  I also do not like the blotchy look of the colors; a consequence of my not mixing the colors in a timely manner.  I suppose it wouldn't be fun if it was easy!

Emulating Shi Tao

Shi Tao (1642 -1707) was a Chinese landscape painter.  His paintings were a little out of character with the times.  His works showed a hint of impressionism, with bold splash ink and absurd looking mountains; as if the mountains were bowing.  I don't know if that had anything to do with the fact that he was a monk, but I find his works most pleasing, even in today's light.

His landscape painting would embody all the traditional thematic matters and techniques and yet he was able to jazz it up to be almost irrelevant.  I found such an example thumbing through a collection of his calligraphy and paintings and decided to study that painting by trying to emulate it.

The basic technique is simple enough; hemp fibre ch'uen was used extensively to describe the rocky formations.

The Chinese brush stroke is so simple and yet pragmatic in describing rocky topography.  Center-tip brush gives one the contour line.  Side-tip brush describes the thickness of that slice of landmass, rendering a 3-dimensional account.

I started off by laying down all the contour lines with light ink, and plotted in some of the shading when the dampness of the brush felt appropriate.

The canon of depth perspective requires the artist to describe incidentals from near to far, thus the buildings behind the first landmass, and a road formed by a long flat ridge directs our attention to the distance.

Shi Tao also used the traditional method to describe a mixed foliage.  In this painting one could clearly see the different brushstrokes used to denote different types of plants.

The negative space seemingly represents clouds, but is also a clever way of creating a separation between landmasses, thus giving depth and perspective.

The painting included several flat top structures to the left of the road.  These flat tops are quite common in classical Chinese landscape.  I remember doing tons of homework learning how to write the flat tops. Unfortunately I've taken this exercise for granted and I can see a lot of problems with my current rendition.  Perhaps I'll have to refresh my memory.

Blue is splashed on to mark the shaded areas.  The distant mountain tops are painted in blue also.  This incidentally agrees with the western method of depicting far away landscape, when earth's atmosphere renders everything blue.  I always remembered being told to use warm colors for close in objects and cold tones for distant objects.  I find it very interesting that a Chinese painter in the late Ming dynasty observed the same principles.

I now use the tea color pigment to fill in the rest of the landscape.

The entire painting is now washed by my brush cleaning bath.  This liquid is the culmination of all the colors that I have used, thus is ideal in establishing an equalizing tone for the entire painting.

My finished painting, an emulation of Shi Tao's work.  As alluded to earlier, I might re-do it to see if I could improve on some of the brushstrokes, especially with regards to the flat tops.