Ripples and waves

I think I have a pathological fear of water.  Some people call that a phobia.  Chinese astrologer has cautioned me about not messing with water, yet according to western astrology I belong to the water sign. Go figure! 

Water to me is the fluid that runs over my head in a shower, the shimmering substance in a river, and the infinite mass of motion and energy out in the ocean.  I still don't understand how water changes its shape to fit into anything, and how it heals itself even when something pokes through it.  I am afraid of it, yet I wish I could live in it, like a fish.  It gives life, and it also takes life; for us terrestrials anyways.  Perhaps I've listened to Rusalka's Song to the Moon too many times.

So I am going to attempt to paint my fascination, water, again.

I will try my luck with alum solution.  Alum is used as a sizing agent to treat Xuan paper, rendering it less absorbent.  It is this particular quality that I am trying to exploit. So I am using un-sized Xuan and paint lines with alum solution.  I mixed in a tiny bit of ink with the alum solution to help me see the stripes better.  I am visualizing the ripples, or little wave fronts as I paint.  I do this on the back of the Xuan paper.  When the paper is turned over, one can see a clear margin forming around the lines painted with alum.  This is the effect I am after.

I then fill in the space between the alum solution drawn lines with ink.  Taking liberty to cover up more or less as desire, and adding new shapes as I go.  After all, water is always changing its form and the ripples are always marching on.  Who is to say that a certain shape or line is correct or incorrect.  

I now have juxtaposed lines of black ink and clear alum, suggesting ripples on a body of water.  I am also painting in some form of a shore or land mass for this body of water.  All these are done on the back of the paper at this point. 

Now I flip over the paper to the right side up, and continue to correct and fill in the ink lines, based on what the paper reveals from the other side.  I am using the backside of the paper as a road map and the top side of the paper for the actual painting.  Notice how the blob of ink on the right is now on the left.  That's because I have flipped the paper over.  I am also giving the shore some structure and texture by amending it with some wild brushstrokes.  They are meant to be ambiguous.  They could be highlights, mist, water, or any combination thereof.  I am rendering the background with slanted brushstrokes, to make the composition more interesting.

Somehow I think the painting needs something to shore up the right side.  I am dabbing in some rough brushstrokes, reminding myself that these are flowers branches from a crabapple tree from my backyard.  I like the interplay of the dabs of petals with the black and white stripes of the water.   That little bit of color is like a garnishing.  

Mountain ridges, the background

Having completed the foreground and middle ground of my classical landscape, I am set for putting in the last player, namely, the background of the landscape.  I am also keenly aware that I still need to fulfill the "height perspective" of a classical landscape.  I need to have something soaring into the heavens.

For this exercise, I am sticking with a safe and seasoned player; mountain ridges.

Mountain ridges, or tops are common and standard features in a classical landscape painting.  In Chinese painting we will typically see a succession of hilltops, forming a mountain range.  I have alluded to this style of interpretation before, equating that to slicing up a potato into many pieces; each piece represents one vertical slice of the mountain.  When we arrange these slices of varying shape and height like pieces of domino tiles, we get to reconstruct the shape and volume of the mountain.

The picture below shows cardboard slices of a "mountain" that I used to help my students visualize a mountain when I was teaching landscape painting.

For my particular painting, I am using these slices from my inventory of shapes for my mountain,

This helps a person to visualize my mountain; my mannequin so to speak.

Typically I would lay down the contour lines of each "slice" of the mountain first.  For this painting however, I just pencil in the approximate position of the mountain and just splash down my individual slices, believing that this would result in a less rigid form.

After the paper dries to touch, I write in the contour lines of the individual slices.

And garnish my slopes with hemp fiber chuen, a technique used to add texture and further describe the topographic details of the landscape.

Shading helps to define the three dimensional structure of the mountain.

The top of these ridges are garnished with hints of shrubs and trees to add interest.

These decorative brushstrokes also serve the function of diverting the viewer's attention from the top dead center of the ridges.  In my haste of laying down the individual slices of the mountain, I committed the sin of lining up the apexes of the tops, forming a straight line towards the top.  By planting my shrubs and trees on some of the flanks of the mountain helps to create an illusion that the ridge tops form a curved and crooked line, which is more interesting and natural.  

Keeping in mind the requirement for depth perspective, which is to narrate a story or association of front and back, I am building a few simple shacks in this background.  

Thus it is plausible now, that people from these humble dwellings could perhaps visit the Ci En Pagoda, the waterfall, and walk alongside the path that sits at the bottom of a straight cliff with a platform on top, trek through the mixed woods and finally arriving at the temple in the foreground.  I trust this should satisfy the depth perspective.

To jazz up my "classical" landscape, I am going to emulate Zhang Daqian by brushing in some bold phthalocyanine blue.  Legend has it that Zhang would use a bowl to splash this bold and vivid color onto a huge painting painted on a enormous sheet of silk brocade, and his apprentices would help him lift the brocade to direct the liquid to flow to the strategic parts of the painting on that piece of silk cloth. 

I might be rushing things a little but I am eager to see what the final dimensions would be after cropping and mounting my painting.  I still have no idea whether I shall frame this painting the conventional way or mount it on canvas or board and then build a frame to house it.