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.