What Is In A Title, Oblivious, Faces Of Silence!

I've alluded to whether a painting needs a title or not in my past posts.  I belong to the camp that says yes it does.

Recently my own personal experience brings home the need for a title.

My portrayal of three faces naturally brought up the question of what this painting was about.

"You were practicing painting a face."

"Empathy"

"Meditation"  

Meditation was by far the most popular nomination.

Then I said, " Have eyes, but Won't  see"

I must admit, my painting was inspired by the verses in The Sound of Silence,

    "people talking without speaking

                people hearing without listening

                         people writing songs that voices never share

                                    and no one dare, disturb the sound of silence"

The face on the right, Arhat, was supposed to have attained the perfect life, free from pain and suffering.  Arhat is believed to have attained nirvana; analogous to a saint in the western religion,  and yet he was represented in reverse values.  Everything about him was just the contrary.  Black became white and white became black.  Despite all that we perceived  him as nothing wrong  in this painting; despite the unspoken uneasiness due to the reversed values.

He did have his eyes closed, or did he?  Oh but wait, he had no eyeballs.  Was he not seeing or just not feeling.  Did I forget to paint in the eyeballs?

So I went from a somber, heavy rendition of a real face on the left, to a negative, fictitious face on the right, and inserted a benevolent Buddha face in the middle for good measure, all with their eyes closed, or half closed.  Everybody knows Buddha is benevolent and caring and a lot of people in this world look to Buddha for comfort and guidance and blessings.

"The Have Eyes But Won't See is too strong and spiteful a statement", commented one person.

"You need to tone it down" was the suggestion.

Like the song said, we can talk without speaking, hear without listening and I included looking without actually seeing.  I am referring to things in general, our living environment, the way we do things, our society, our world.

Could this be denial?  Denial is a perfect coping mechanism and we all do that to some extent to protect ourselves.

So were these faces pretending that they don't or can't see because their eyes were conveniently closed or missing?  I used the negative Arhat face to say there's more to that.  This Arhat was not what he was cracked up to be. 

This painting is not about meditation or empathy.

Donald Rumsfeld ( US Secretary of Defense ) had said that there are "known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns".  That seemed like a conundrum but if one analyzes that closely, it makes perfect sense. (I hope I'm not misquoting here)

There are times ( and people who) when we lack the knowledge that we actually are ignorant.  There is a medical condition called anosognosia when a person is truly unaware of one's own defect.

I am going to bastardize this term to include everyday circumstances when the persons involved are truly ignorant of the facts, and doing so without malice.

I was involved in some discussion of whether the Xuan I paint on is archival or not.  To the western practitioner who paints on paper, perhaps that is of utmost importance, being archival grade and acid free and what not.  For someone who paints on Xuan this question never arose.  Paintings done on Xuan and silk and mounted on paper or silk  from centuries ago survived just fine. We have always taken that for granted.  Yet both sides argue and insist.

The west insists that paper be archival and the east insists that mounting not only be done, but done in the traditional fashion.  My way of mounting on canvas, cement board or plastic catches nothing but ire. Perhaps these new substrates are unknown territories, their compatibility and longevity have not been proven.  One thing both sides agreed on was dry mounting is bad.  Has the traditional wet mounting of Xuan fallen victim to modern day technology?  Or is the old way of doing things too time consuming and is out of sync with the I Want It Now mentality?  Or could this be that nobody wants to invest the time into learning how to wet mount anymore?

People used to think the earth was flat and we were the center of the universe.  We insist and fight based on preconceptions, prejudices, customs, cultures and religion.  Assumptions that are not well vetted, or simply beyond our comprehension.

So are these insistence anosognosic or are they just ignorant demands.  Are we so afraid to step out of the box and give things a try?  Food for thought.

Sorry about the segue but I really needed to get that off my chest.  

In the end I am going to title my piece "Oblivious".  Arhat, Buddha, all the Salvation in the world is not going to deliver us from human slaughtering each other, from natural disasters.   People engaging in wars pray to their gods for a successful mission.  Both sides do that, I am sure.  If the deity was merciful and all knowing, why would any favoritism be bestowed.  Are our lives worth more than the enemies?  After all we are all His children.  After a disaster people have a moment of silence and pray for the victims.  So where is the Creator now?  Why would such calamity be allowed to happen to his flock in the first place.  I have no doubt for that brief moment, in the prayer,  most of us feel connected to the Spirit and that we empathized and we gave off sincere, kind thoughts.   Humanity, we're supposed to be human beings.  Homo sapiens, we are supposed to have feelings and a conscience.

If we can assume there is life after death and reincarnation and all that, then is the purported utopia a known unknown, and if we have no expectations or beliefs, then is that an unknown unknown?  If we are emphatic about our death is the final curtain then that must be a known known. What makes a person think and wish that our existence should be forever?  That goes far beyond the survival instinct bred into our DNA.  Do we exercise good deeds just for the sake of karma?  If there was no law, no watch dogs, no god, would we have behaved the same?

In either case, we all have eyes and most of us have sight but how many of us really see with them.   We might as well be blind or have no eyeballs.  We are blinded by pride.  We are blinded by ideology. We are blinded by ignorance.  We are blinded by convenience.

I am guilty as charged. 

Oblivious.  That's the only answer I could offer.  These are faces of silence.

My beef with Rice Paper

People here always ask me if I paint on rice paper. 

At first I was confounded.  What do they mean?

"Oh, you mean Xuan paper?"

I've been trying hard to correct this misnomer until I searched Wikipedia.  I am disappointed that the paper which has nothing to do with rice is called rice paper.  The term was supposedly coined by Robert Morrison, a missionary back in the 1800's.

The main ingredient for making Xuan paper is fibers from the bark of the Blue Sandalwood.  The proportion varies from 40 to 80%.  To that is mixed in with fibers from indigenous area, and these may include rice straw, grass straw, hemp, mulberry and bamboo.

The rice paper I grew up with is an edible sheet of dried starch used to package food.  I am submitting a picture of a plum paste jelly/walnut snack wrapped with rice paper.  The paper shields the outside packaging from the sticky content and saves the consumer from having to peel off the wrapping  paper before eating the goody.

How could an ill adopted name from centuries ago survive this long.  Was there no one to speak up?

I am just saying. I believe in calling a spade a spade.

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

Let The Sunshine In

Traditionally we have  to mount paintings done on Xuan to a substrate for viewing and display.
I have explored substrates like canvas ( my Xuan-boo technique) and Wonderboard to benefit from their textures. 

The matrimony of water soluble pigments and ink and the translucent Xuan produces a lush and ethereal feeling.  One way to exploit this characteristic is to NOT mount the Xuan.  This is best done by allowing light to peek through from behind the Xuan, adding another dimension to the viewing experience.

I did a painting of aquatic and atmospheric scenery.  For the rays, I employed the "minus" technique.
I used a wet clean brush to go over the freshly painted areas repeatedly to take away (minus) from the saturation.

Here is a look of the work in ambient light.

Here is a look of the same work when put against a window.

I used a float frame for this dramatic effect.  Reminds me of the stained class works.