C'era una volta il West

I kept looking at my Painted Hill painting and something did not feel right.

I eventually noticed that my dunes were flanked from the front only, with nothing in the back.  That didn't make any sense.

A horizon was written in.  That was easy enough.  Ink soaked tip was allowed to disperse ink via pre-wetted areas just below the ink line.  The area to the right of the big dune was a little too vast to work this formula, so a few dark dunes were painted in, to contrast with the lighter dune in the front.

It was making more sense.  The painting however was still begging for something.  Can't really put my finger on it.  

Perhaps I could add a few details like some sage brushes, or some Agave plants to give my desert some nuance.  

I picked my horse hair brushes for this endeavor.  

I don't know which part of the horse did the hair come from.  All I could say is that the hair bristles are just that.  They are bristles of thick, strong, stiff hair.  Almost like a wire brush if I'm allowed to embellish my words. 

I used these brushes because the stiff hair made the brushstrokes more forceful and resolute in appearance.  Perhaps one's wrist wiggles and wanders less with a stiff brush?  Thus I thought my sage brush and whatnot would appear less wimpy?  Since they were in such a harsh environment?  That was the idea anyways.

Something was still amiss.

Perhaps my mind was too keenly focused on the two melodies, that of the sky and the desert.  I sensed a certain alienation.  Perhaps that was the notion that I was looking for all along.  Yet I was not liking it when I looked at the painting.  The sky and the earth should be one.

I kept referring to the clouds in the sky as a melody, and the dunes of the desert as my counter-melody.  If this painting was truly a musical interpretation, then I needed a resolution to tie the two melodies together.

How about a tree in the near foreground.   

The tree could steer the line of sight from the ground to the sky, and also helped to extend the scenery even farther away.  

I had intended for the small dune on the left to assume the darkest tone.  I felt that the large dune on the right was too dark for a proper separation.  But how do I lighten the value.  This was not an oil painting or something that I could overpaint on.

I turned to the back of the translucent Xuan.  I used titanium white on the back of the large dune.

The idea was not to "lighten" the dune per se, but to ensure that I had a solid white background to define my tones in that area.  Thus the light and void areas would absolutely look brighter and lighter with a solid white backing from the titanium white.

Had I used the titanium white on the surface of the paper, the occlusive paint would impart a different texture and reflectiveness to the surface of the painting.  The effect would be an unpleasant one.  Whereas the color on the back of the paper would do its job without any fuss.  The coloring-on-the-back of Xuan technique is commonly employed when we do leaves and flower petals.  Often a color of indigo or yellow (a difficult color to master) would be painted on the back of the paper, and the intended color would be painted on the top side.  The combined effect of the two colors from both sides of the paper is delicately elegant.  

The same technique was applied to the tree.

I used the stiff horse hair brush to write the tree, so the brushstrokes were streaky with lots of void space showing in-between the bristles.  The titanium white on the back made sure that the voids in the brushstrokes showed up, giving a knurly character to the branches of this dead tree in a forsaken place.

Perhaps the painting now looked somewhat cliché, but it most certainly made sense.  Without color cues to describe the landscape, especially not knowing a thing about the striated claystone layers, the menacing clouds and the bleak landscape spell doom, not beauty.  I suppose the dead tree is the epitaph in a sense.  It might as well be a cross. What if I painted a cross and not a dead tree?  That would be a lot more theatrical.  I wonder if the sky was painted blue and the dunes were given stripes of gold and black and rust, would the painting assume an inviting and adventurous persona, and not one of desolation?

The painting was inspired by C'era una volta il West. (Once upon a time in the West)

Wild Wild West-Painted Hills

It is time to compose my counter-melody, i.e. the bottom half of the wild wild west.  This is the part where the desert scene of Painted Hills in central Oregon would fit in.  

There really is a place called the Painted Hills in central Oregon.  The spot is actually not a desert so to speak, but a gathering of dunes of claystones that display stratified layers of different colors, from rust to gold to black.  I picked this theme as my counter-melody because I think the stripes are very different from the clouds.  The exception is that they are both layered.  Yes clouds are amorphous but a sea of clouds certainly has structure.  In my painting they are layered.  Thus I believe it would be visually stimulating to compare and contrast the clouds with striped dunes.  

I started out with a small dune.  I needed this to be a reference point for my darkest tone for this half of the painting.

I then painted in the foreground.  A nondescript stretch of real-estate.

Chuen are brushstrokes used to describe the texture of the soil or rocks.  I've touched upon techniques like the axe-chuen, hemp chuen in my past blogs, and I had also alluded to the dot-chuen.  This is done by writing dots in strategic areas; either to help with shading, or to hide mistakes.  In my case, I used this technique to texturized the entire foreground.  Sort of like pixels from yesteryears newspaper print.  Or perhaps what the western world called pointillism.  Isn't it interesting that the East and the West are really not that different.

 

My next chore was to construct the main theme of this counter-melody; the main dune that occupied the greater portion of the lower half of the painting.

I had written in the shape of the dune, and the contour lines of the lopes of the dune.  Thrusting my brush backwards such that the brush tip lined up with the contour line was my way to achieve the proper shading.  This was done in lieu of the traditional chuen technique because I found shading to be more effective in describing the lobes.  A void in the middle of the lobe suggested a bulging structure.  My goal was to create these fingers running down the slopes of the dunes.  

Stripes were written to illustrate the striated features of these painted hills.

The lower left portion of the landscape was left open on purpose.  This is what we Chinese brush painters called "breathing".  It helped to open up the scene.  Had that void been filled in, the painting might look somewhat claustrophobic.