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.