Painting Rooster

This is the year of the Rooster so that explains my motivation for painting the rooster.

It is customary for a lot of Chinese businesses to print and give away complimentary calendars to celebrate the New Year thus an example of a rooster painting would not be difficult to come by.  I would say that most of these paintings would have the quintessential arrangement of a rooster with other elements of Chinese brush painting; such as wisteria, chrysanthemum, bamboo, Taihu stone, peony.

I want to present my bird in a stylized manner.  I want  to emphasize the pose as being intrepid, arrogant.  My personal perception of a sassy bird is one with an attitude, one that struts with swag and raises its tail feathers like a proud peacock.  I also want to dispense with the usual incidental elements that I mentioned earlier. I wanted my painting to tell a story, instead of a still life arrangement.

I don't want to be too far from the truth with regards to anatomical features, so I looked at a few pictures of the head, paying attention to the comb and the wattles and how they relate to the eye and the beak.

I did my practice exercise

I just realized I left out the ear and the ear lobe!

I also wanted to get the feet right,  Not trusting my memories of years of munching on chicken feet, again I gathered reference material;  and realized that a painting with a 5 or 3 toed rooster is an erroneous depiction.

I sketched out the pose for my bird first, and went to work.  I chose a non-bleached paper with visible strands of fiber, for that informal, home made, folksy feel.

I filled in the plumage

and adorned it with my attitude piece de resistance, the rooster tail.  I painted it high and proud.

I thought the lone cock is too austere for such an auspicious occasion and a companion is needed. I thought for a long time about the composition and I arrived at needing a hen that faces the other direction.  I want the birds to be doing do-si-do and not promenade.  I think this arrangement carries more theater.

I found this picture on the net

My wish was granted.

I used the shaft of my brush to extend a line of sight from the rooster's eye and placed the hen there. I needed to show what he was interested in.  This is a key element in establishing the relationship between the main characters.

Not afraid of running the risk of being trite or pedantic, I decided to complement the rooster and the hen with a family.

After I texted this image to my confidant, I was reminded that the 2 chicks were placed too evenly and suggested I add another member to the brood.

I am thankful for that advice.

I like the emotion and the energy this painting portrays.  I can sense the movement and interaction in this family. The parents' focus was in each other, and the chicks begged only from the mother.  Of course I am biased.

What I don't like is the rooster looked a little slim to me.  I would love to have painted a fuller lower body.  I think I painted his foot wrong.  Had I painted his toes facing the viewer, it would have suggested a body turning towards the viewer, thus presenting a narrower girth.

The angle of the leg stance did not seem right either.  It was too straight.  I was so carried away by the thought of standing pound and tall that I ignored the natural stance.  Had I superimposed the leg skeletal structure onto my rooster to begin with, in my mind at least, I would have avoided this mistake.

The above illustration shows the relative angles of the femur, tibia and the tarsometatarsals of the rooster's leg.  It is obvious that the leg does not go vertically  up and down.  Just to prove my point I digitally moved the leg to the new position.  I think it looks much better this way.  What a difference 9 degrees off center makes!

Again, Happy New Year!

Happy New Year. Year of the Rooster

may the year be an auspicious one!

Same Roots, Different Feel

Now that I have two paintings of banyan tree roots, I'm left with the task of deciding which one I like better.

The one on the right is methodical, deliberate and manicured.  The one on the left is devoid of discrete lines and comprised mostly of shadows.

The right one gives a very detailed accounting of where everything is.  There seems to be order in the chaos, if one is interested and motivated to find out.  The one on the left just stares at you; you either hate it or love it.

Somehow the left one elicits a stronger emotional response from me.  I can't really put a finger on it.  Perhaps it's my dark personality. In fact as it stands right now, the more I look at the one on the right, the more anemic it seems.

So now I have to choose a piece for an exhibition and I am still vacillating between the two.

In a way I would really hate to lose the one on the right, if by some weird luck I manage to sell the piece. I want to be able to savor the fruit of my labor a bit longer, especially after the enormous amount of time and effort into it.  Something tells me that painting is not fully done yet.

The fact that there are leaves depicted in the painting added another layer of symbolism to the work.  Chinese has a saying that as the leaves fall, they return to the roots.  The meaning could be literal, but it actually describes the cycle of life.  Leaves mature, fall, and decompose and return the nutrients to the tree to be recycled.  We also have another saying; whenever one drinks water, think of where it came from.  So along with finding one's roots, one also appreciates the natural cycle of life.

One might say that the one on the left is a shallower painting, but only I know the hidden meanings.  So I will go with my gut feeling, put the darker one into the exhibition, the one that is more superficial yet elicits a stronger feeling.

I also want to show the translucent property of the semi-sized Xuan.  Ink from the brushstrokes totally penetrated the paper, such that the back side of the paper showed a painting in reverse.

Here's the back side of the one on the left

and the back side of the one on the right

This is the reason I worked on my process of Suliao Xuan Ban; on the process of mounting on plastic.  I wanted the effect of a float that can be viewed from either the front or the back.  Perhaps the painted panes on a lit lantern illustrate my point.