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.   

Atmosphere

I viewed a video clip of the SpaceX Starship on a return trip back to earth, re-entering the atmospheric bubble that encases our planet earth.  As it passed through the seemingly invisible air, there was enough friction generated between the Starship and air molecules to produce heat, which was intense enough to make it glow.  I was reminded of glowing crucible from a furnace in my chemistry lab.  Absolutely mesmerizing. 

It is difficult for me to fathom that the invisible air that we breathe everyday is capable of causing such searing heat.  The air looks and feels so innocuous. Of course don't tell that to anyone who has weathered a hurricane, or typhoon in my case.  Or anyone who has gone through severe turbulence during a flight.  Water, we can see and respect but we seem to take air for granted.

An acclaimed quote from my fellow countryman Bruce Lee is "be like water".  I am fascinated by water.  I admire and fear water simultaneously.  The fleeting shimmer, the incessant swells. From the trickling stream to the rhythmic crashes of waves.  Yet I'm not keen to ford every stream because I'm afraid of drowning, even for shallow water.  Incredibly I am a water-sign, I'm told. 

I've done quite a few paintings with a water theme.  Any student of Chinese brush landscape painting has to learn how to paint mountains and water.  The literal translation of 山水畫 is paintings of mountains and water.  Water and air are both fluids by definition; a shapeless substance that moves freely and adopt the shape of its container.  So how do I paint air?

Perhaps I could submit a huge blank piece of Xuan and label it "AIR".  Perhaps some avant-garde gallery would sponsor my brilliant piece of art and it will draw an audience of arms-folding admirers.  Wink. Wink. 

It dawned on me that I don't paint water per se, but the features of it.  The pounding waves, the tremulous ripples.  So I could paint air by it's features, the floating clouds, the veiling mists.  

This new project should offer me a chance for some experimentation.  How to capture the fleeting atmospheric phenomena.  

I'm choosing a semi-sized Xuan for my tinkering.  I wish to benefit from the ability of ink to disperse somewhat before getting fully absorbed into the fibers.  I am hoping that this property will help to bring out the notion of transition, both figuratively and literally. 

I am using two brushes.  One with dark ink, the other just water.  My gist is to write an ink track and immediately apply water to the edges to modify the track and allow the ink to diffuse and disperse under the guidance of the water brush.  My rationale is clouds have dark and bright sides, sometimes defined by bright sharp edges; depending on where the sun is.  I wonder if this is where the term "silver lining" came from. The dark and light sides are not dissimilar to painting lobes of a hill or mountain.  The lobes of clouds are obviously less rigid and more amorphous unless the clouds are those of the anvil thunder clouds variety.  Anyways this is like a game to me.  A game that has a few tenets, but one can wink it most of the time.  

A line is written with ink, and modified with a water brush as shown in the next insert

Subsequent "lines" are written and modified to represent layers of clouds,

Repeating this process to build my atmospheric features,

Here is where I call it quits, enough playing for now.