Emulating, Copying

The rote learning tradition of Chinese brush painting required most of us going through the repetitive process of practicing the fundamentals, Ji Ben Gong.  We learned how to use the brush, manipulating the tip and the edge, techniques evolved from brush calligraphy.  The old reference book Mustard Seed Garden provides loads of information on how to arrange and paint different subject matters, and gives examples of the different styles, stemming from different dynasties and assorted artists. To hone our skills and to put these examples into practice, we are often required to emulate or copy works from famous masters.

We benefit from such excursions only if we pay critical attention to the various aspects of the masters' paintings, and how they relate to the examples in Mustard Seed Garden.  Otherwise it's an exercise in futility. Worse yet, we will be repeating our mistakes without knowing it.

Recently I encountered a student's emulation of an old landscape painting, probably of the Song circa.
I was very surprised when the instructor piled heaps of compliments on this exercise because as a student of Chinese brush painting, I felt that student totally missed the boat.

I didn't think the student understood what all those lines represented.  I had posted in my past blogs about the contour lines of the mountains as being thin vertical slices of the structure, as if we were looking at a series of a CT scan of the mountain.

Here are some typical examples of classical brush landscapes

There were too many scalloping on the contour lines ( circled red ) and the flat platform showed no reference to the edges ( circled blue ) and obviously the trees were haphazardly placed.  Jagged undulating lines were mistaken for little mounds.  I refuse to believe for one minute that the original looked anything like that.  I thought this was a searing example of illustrating our bad habits; blindly copying without understanding.  Either that or I was using a different yardstick.

I thought I would take a picture and compare that with the original for more research and the instructor blocked my capture with a hand, stating that I needed permission from the student for my picture taking.

I was at a loss; confused and startled.  The instructor would have no second thoughts about making photo copies of copy righted material and yet was being so adamant about my taking a picture of what I deemed as a bad case of copying? Taking a photo of a copy of a copy elicited ire!   God help me.

I rather enjoy the landscape works of Zhang Daqian ( 1899-1983 ).  His bold use of color and the splashing technique was refreshing for me.  Unfortunately he was also known as a supreme forger.  Anyways it is his craft that I wanted to study.

I decided to emulate a snippet of his LuShan Painting.  This painting is interesting in that Zhang had never set foot there.  He composed it purely from imagination and experience from other places.  I chose the semi-sized Xuan for the ease of  floating colors.

I started out by sketching with charcoal and painted in the tree trunks using alum mixed in with a base color.
I needed the alum to help define the body of the trees, even under the cloaking of the leaves.  It works sort of like a resist does in watercolor.

Using light ink, I wrote in the tree that was not colored in the original painting.  The fact that Master Zhang left this tree untouched was interesting, as if he wanted us to see his creative process; this along with the faint sketch lines he made of trees and contours towards the upper middle part of the painting.  I also utilized the light ink to loosely dab in the shaded areas of the precipitous, making it easier to identify the tucked in areas.

I then began the arduous task of writing in the leaves on these trees, paying attention that there were different styles of leaves, as pertained to the mixed woods canon.

A base coat of color was applied to form the hills, and the various ledges and flat tops, also delineating the folds along the flat top edges and the little trail that led to the bottom flat top.

Accumulating layers of color and Chuen strokes to render texture to the landscape.

Applying Lotus Leaf Chuen to the hill on the left, adding reference to where the trees were sprouted.  This simple technique helped the viewer to perceive that the trees grew not out of a  straight line, but rather, a mass that had a top surface.  It added to the dome shaped top of the structure.

To summarize, I paid attention to the following attributes when I decided to emulate this piece of work:

1. mixed woods presentation of the trees
2. naked, exposed, tenacious roots, and suggestion of a broad root system even on distant trees
3. how to preserve the tree trunks as discrete voids
4. relationship of the roots to the land, how the trees are anchored
5. the edge and folds of the flat tops, and their relationship to the precipitous
6. the roof tops behind the tree line for Depth Perspective
7. the addition of Lotus Leaf Chuen to help modulate the otherwise two dimensional hill ridge
8. the continuation of the land mass as represented by the sketch lines to the right of the trees,    dissolving into the ambiguous background, lending so much more virtual space to the ambiance

It was a fun exercise, and hopefully I retained some of the knowledge gained.