Prepping For A Demo

I was asked to do a Chinese Brush painting demonstration at one of the local venues.  I told them I would, and my topic would be landscape paintings.

Landscape painting is among the most difficult genre to master.  Needless to say it requires expert brush skill, but it is often laden with so many rules and doctrines, to the extent that it smothers creativity.  Chinese landscape paintings are in essence impressionistic abstract paintings that portray a a state of mind, a philosophy, rather than an object.  It is this ether that gets lost in the process.  I suppose one could describe a well manicured garden with all its physical attributes, design elevations and its eclectic collection of flora but it is the enjoyment of the garden, be it rests merely on the surroundings, or otherwise the sentiments it evokes, that ultimately establishes the garden.

I am certainly no expert in this area, and that is exactly why I wanted to take up this self imposed challenge.  I wanted to approach this demonstration from the standpoint of a student.

A student must do homework, and I need to have a clear road map in my mind as to what I plan to present, so I settled down to devise my program.  My experience with these demonstration sessions are that they are always fluid.  Some audience members are surprisingly well versed, whilst others are totally uninformed and I need to be able to talk at both levels at the same time.  We could be examining one topic and it quickly digressed to something else.  That is the reason I need to be more than a one trick pony and have an arsenal of useful skills and information that I can retrieve from.

Students of classical Chinese Brush are aware of the two main styles of painting, namely the Gonbi and the Xieyi; where the former is a more formal style with distinct outlines and filled in color and the latter is more expressive brushstroke ( especially broad side-tipped used to describe surfaces) format.  Landscape paintings demand a good understanding of the Ji Ben Gong ( fundamentals ) which deals with Gou, Chuen, Ts'a, R'an and D'ian ( outline, texture, rub, wash, dot )

Landscape paintings are often a combination of the two, although there are works that are predominately one or the other.  I shall start with the study of the more brushstroke-weighted ( surface weighted) one.  Here the brushstrokes represent a shape, a landmass in this case; and also the light values and shading.

I reached into my tools bag and dug up an old model that I fashioned with foam core board

using charcoal I rubbed the contour onto my Xuan ( I must emphasize that this is not the traditional way of doing Chinese landscape paintings, but strictly something I devised to help myself and others understand the brushstrokes)

I started on the left side and built my backdrop of a trail with steps using light and medium ink

Using dark ink, I sought out the areas that are shielded from the light and did my side tip brushstrokes

As the ink is depleted gradually from the brush, take advantage of that by laying into areas that require a lighter value.  A clear understanding and concept of how the rocks are presented helps to write in these brushstrokes.  In an ideal situation, the charcoal contour lines should not be visible at all, since they never existed to begin with.  They are only "cheat lines" to help the student visualize the structure.  Thus I was trying hard to conceal these lines.

Moving on to the right side, I inserted the rest of the backdrop

Voila, the completed sketch

Before I proceed to my next etude, let me just say that I am not too happy with the above rendition.
The more brushstroke-weighted (surface-weighted) style is supposed to be more spirited and free and yet I don't see that at all.  I believe the culprit is in my charcoal sketch lines.  Those were supposed to guide me as to where to write in my brushstrokes but they ended up being quite restrictive.  I was trying to conceal them as well as follow them and thus my brushstrokes looked more like tracings than actual strokes.  They lacked gusto!

While my scheme MIGHT help us understand where to wet the paper with ink, it also created a rather rigid image.

I turned my attentions to the more traditional method of painting landscape, half Gonbi, half Xieyi.
This process begins by establishing outlines of hills, rocks, trees etc., anything that is in the foreground or middle-ground.  These areas enjoy a more rigorous and detailed description from the brushstrokes.  Thus the process of Gou is the first step.

As the ink gets depleted from the brush, which also gets drier as the writing continues, we need to strategically start writing in areas that demand a lighter tone, also the process of Chuen and T'sa as the opportunities present.  In other words, Gou started out as a single minded procedure, but as the brush changes its characteristics then we take advantage of the situation by incorporating Chuen and T'sa.  This concurrent administering of the 3 techniques gives the painting a more cohesive feel.

The background, or objects far far away are always depicted with the broad strokes without Gou lines. These are suggestions that something exists out there.  The broad side-tipped strokes are used.

After the basic skeleton is acquired, it is time to employ R'an, to add shading and establish the darker tones.  R'an can be most effective and dramatic when corroborated with the Chuen that is already in place.  It really defines the faces of the rocks and the texture.  It helps if we can hypothesize and visualize where and how the light illuminates the formations.

Using burnt sienna, or tea, we judiciously color in the highlighted areas

Write in the darker areas with indigo and ink mixed.  Do this before the tea or burnt sienna dries so the transition of color is smooth and is easier on the eyes.  Also use a non transparent color like green label one to write in the flat land and shore  at the base of the conical pillars.

Close-up of fine tuning the rock face

The reason for using a non transparent color of the shores is so that when we put in the reflection of the pillars in water, the gouache like color is not covered, retaining the integrity of the shores.

D'ian is selectively applied to hide bad lines, or to accentuate a contour line, suggesting vegetation in the crevasses, tree stands, blades of grass along the shoreline or simply as decoratios to take up space, like a potted plant in the corner of a room.  Obviously tree leaves are prime candidates for its application.

The brushstrokes need to be lively and expressive, despite the fact that they seem like mere dots.

The finished painting

which is loosely based on this scene from Guiln

I feel a lot better now.

I feel like I have given the impending demo an honest preparation.

I feel like I have gone to the confession booth and have all my sins absolved.......

Silent Protest

This pond would have a dwarf weeping cherry tree and the Heron would come and stand next to it.  Perhaps the bull frog season has ended, the Heron did not find much to stuff through its long neck.  The creature just turned away from the water and chose to face the Dwarf;  motionless, whilst the wind whipped up its chest feathers, betraying its presence.

 I gave the title "ODD COUPLE" to this painting.

The painting was done in a cold tone.  I tried to do the neck as a single brush stroke but I failed.   It took several passes to get the shape down.  I was hoping to write the neck as a reverse "S".  The feathers were side tipped brush strokes.  I used a rather dry brush to begin with, intended on bringing  out the texture of the feathers but the resulting bird was too harsh.  A moistened brush dabbing over the original strokes took care of that.  The outline of the bird was done broken style.  A continuous smooth line would resemble too much of the Gonbi style and would render this "motionless" heron "dead".

The dwarf weeping cherry on the other hand, was made to look menacing.   The clawing branches and the exposed arthritic roots seem to mock the heron.  There is a tension between the 2 subjects.  The tension is not of an overt hostility, but a muted resolve of c'est la vie, que sera sera, whatever !!  The heron has sought solace from an unlikely source.  The tree can't just get up and walk away.  It is what it is.  How often do we find ourselves in this predicament, an uneasy acceptance of our fate?

I was a participant at a bazaar for arts and crafts, hawking my paintings at a ridiculously low price ( so I was told ).   It was a juried event and I applied as an artist doing Chinese Brush Painting.  This venue labeled me as a Sumi-e artist on the program.   Granted my works do use ink and wash, but I am not a sumi-e artist, especially when I did not label myself  as such.  What is the big deal, you might ask.  Let me put it in this perspective:  A Chinese is an Asian, but not all Asians are Chinese.  What's scary about this ordeal is that the event was sponsored by an art school as a fund raiser.  Imagine how that  school would teach Asian art?

So how did the art form that originated from China ended up being labelled here as sumi-e?   When I was looking for teachers for my Chinese Brush Painting, I came across our local cultural center, whose putative mission was to bridge the cultures, and it offered classes in Spontaneous Chinese Brush and Elaborate Chinese Brush.  Obviously I was confused.  Fortunately I could read Chinese.  What the center meant to advertise was that it offered classes in Xieyi and Gonbi styles of Chinese Brush.  I objected vehemently to this advertising and was told that the non Chinese would not understand Xieyi or Gonbi.   So how do we bridge the east and the west?  How do we bridge any culture if we can't even be honest with ourselves, by calling a spade a spade, instead of saying an implement shaped like a flat scoop with a long handle used for digging.  My suggestion was to stay with the proper nomenclature Gonbi and Xieyi, and put(  Elaborate Chinese Brush ) and (Spontaneous Chinese Brush ) in brackets.  Exposure is everything; we must allow people the opportunity to be familiar with and start using the proper terminology.

Do we translate proper nouns?  Would anyone attempt to translate President Bush other than phonetically?  Likewise we would not allow Chairman Mao to be translated as Chairman Hair! (Mao means hair in Chinese)

When China changed the nomenclature of Peking to Beijing, she asserted to the world that she wants the world to address her as she would address herself.  Peking was probably the  result of some foreigner trying to emulate Chinese pronunciation of Beijing.   At first I was led to believe that this was pidgin English but later I understood pidgin English was something else totally.  Yet during the last Olympics many of the news anchors from  the U.S. ( some of them well known national personalities ) while doing the broadcast in situ , would insist on pronouncing the simple "J" sound in Beijing as a "J" sound in  French "bon jour".  These anchors must have known in their daily contact with the locals and yet they insisted on their assumption.  The word Beijing meant "North" "Capitol".  I am glad that it was not translated literally and only phonetically.   When we insisted on calling Chow Mein by its proper name, people learned to accept it for what it is, just as they accepted crepe and baklava.   Unfortunately us overseas Chinese, especially those of us in the States did not have the spine to insist on calling our fried rice as Chow Farn, thus allowing us to be the butt of the joke for saying  "fly lice".  I, for one, refuse to believe that Chinese could not distinguish "B" and "P" sounds, or that we are deaf to "R" and "L" sounds.  My belief is that we are afraid to "stir up" trouble.  We don't want to make a mountain out of a mole hill.  We were taught to not offend others.  After all people do get the gist of it, so why insist? 

At the bazaar I overheard some Asians telling their western friends to ignore my booth because my "stuff" was "not Chinese" and they were really "not good".  Obviously mine were not museum nor gallery pieces, but neither were any of the other artisans.  Perhaps my pieces did not fit the stereotype?  Did tramping on a fellow Asian elevate us to be more sophisticated and savvy or did it expose our own insecurity?   Would I have felt the same betrayal had the people saying that were not Asians?  For the price I was asking for, my works were real bargains, but that really wasn't the issue.

For my town of half a million souls, the population is innocently naive when it comes to Chinese Brush painting, or at least most of the fellow artists that I had dealt with are.    Words like sumi-e and kanji are used generically sans ill will, just as Google had enjoyed the transformation from a noun to a verb.   People are eager to show that they know something of the eastern culture but stumbled in their quest because they were never told the truth.

So there is this feeling of injustice, insecurity and ambiguity in me.   Should I continue to voice what I perceive as inaccurate or just tolerate with a patronizing smile.  Should I allow myself to be casted as a sumi-e artist doing spontaneous painting on rice paper?   Need I worry that if I insist too strongly then there might not be a role for me to play at all, because the public would have perceived me of having a "bad attitude"; to coin a favorite corporate  Management verbiage.   The fact that local Chinese restaurants that serve Chinese food have few Caucasian clients and the Chop Suey joints here have no Chinese customers speak volume for my concern.   Perhaps what I am serving up on my Xuan-boo is chop suey??

I blame this outburst  on the holidays.  I am told that people are a little moody around this time of the year.  .  I should know, I am a pharmacist.  I must be the Grinch of the X'mas.  Could it be I am just suffering from SAD?  Better up my Prozac dosage, and in the meantime I'll protest in silence.

 Let it be, just let it be, uttering under my breath.

HAPPY NEW YEAR