Finding My Roots, Chapter Three

I wanted to leave the lower left corner devoid of details, to contrast with the upper right corner of intricate arrangements of roots.  Call me fastidious but somehow I always bear in mind the importance of contrast in my painting, the ying and the yang, and in Chinese terms, the host and the guest.  Perhaps this is even more critical in a painting like this, where the entire paper surface seemed to be occupied by the same monotonous subject matter.  Soon I deemed that corner to be too meager, so I turned to my leaves and gravels.

Judicious application of shadows around the edges gave them a three dimensional feel, lifting them off the ground.  The shadow of the top leaf gave the illusion that it was folding onto itself.

I happened to notice that when viewed from a very shallow angle, the surface of the paper is buckled with lots of tiny undulations, as a result of all the brushstrokes.  That explains why the ink wash sometimes found interesting routes on its own.  By capitalizing this phenomenon I was able to form more natural margins on my roots.  At the very least, I could use that as a guide to apply my shadows.  This is an advantage this semi-sized Xuan offered.

There were lots of places where roots branched out like a cross, and shading was done by sitting the belly of my brush at these axillary points.  This is analogous to running a round file at the inside corner of crossbars to get a nice chamfer edge.

My finished work:

I particularly like the upper right quadrant of the painting.  It narrated very nicely the relationship of  the mangled roots; which ones were on top, which ones were on the bottom.  I could almost trace each root as they emerged from the main branch and then fused with others or submerged into the soil.  This is what we Chinese meant when we choose to say "to read a painting" over "to view a painting".  By reading a painting, one is not turning over pages, but all the elements and nuances with our mind.