Mounting the Gazing painting 歲月人生

There's a chance the "Gazing out the window" painting might get accepted into an exhibition.  I can't put off mounting the painting any longer.

I'll be using the traditional wet mounting method.

The painting was done on the very fibrous "leather" Xuan, which as the name implies, is rather thick.  I choose it because of its texture and its resistance to rubbing.  I had anticipated a fair amount of repeated brushing and washing to get my dark tones but I lucked out.  It turned out to be rather straight forward, which was a pleasant surprise.  The heavier stock Xuan presents its own unique challenge for wet mounting.  It takes a while longer for the water to completely seep through and for the starch to spread evenly.

The best indication is to look at the back of the painting and see if the image from the painted side comes through totally or not.

When the water finally soaks through, the painting would appear to be painted on the back side, due to the color saturation.  All the fibers on the back become quite visible (against the black background in tis case) since they never made any contact with the brush during the painting process.  The paper is too thick to allow total saturation of the fibers to begin with, thus only the ones on the top side of the painting get the ink, blending in with the background.

Starch is now applied.

A piece of blank Xuan paper is now placed onto the face-down, starched panting.  The set of these two pieces of Xuan is now ready to be hung on a flat surface to dry.  The drying process takes out all the creases and flattens the painting, just as starched fabric.

The heavier stock fibrous "leather" Xuan can be quite stubborn and be a little uncooperative at this juncture.  This heavier, wet sheet has a stronger affinity for the piece of plexiglass where it sits on, than the flimsier, thinner backing Xuan that is on top.  Thus when one lifts the backing sheet off the plexiglass, the painting stays sucked to the plexiglass, instead of bonding with the backing, to be lifted as one piece. 

I have concocted a tool using a branch from my pear tree.

I whittle one end of the branch into a thin spatula.  The spatula is sanded smooth and sealed with a polymer finish to better withstand moisture.  The is used to gently lift the corner of the wet, starched painting off the plexiglass so that it can bond with the backing Xuan and be lifted as a single, bonded piece.

Now I can hang the starched painting with its backing on a flat surface to dry.

My newly mounted "Gazing out the window" painting.  Doesn't it look fresh off the press?  

I have made no attempts to hide the brushstrokes in achieving the eventual dark values.  One can easily see the different tonal streaks.  I do this with the intention of exploiting the dark and dilapidated look to contrast with the bright outside.  Adding more drama.

  

The painting is now ready.  All it needs is a frame.  And an invitation to exhibit.  

Multnomah Falls

A major part of the historic Old Columbia River Highway was reopened not long ago, iteafter the landslide was cleared away and damaged section repaired. One could again drove to the many different falls dotting the highway.  I recently painted the Vista House from the Columbia River Gorge, and was itching to paint the Multnomah Falls again.

I must have tried 3 or 4 different iterations of the Multnomah Falls over the years and I realized that my approach to this subject matter was different each time.  I was more or less bound by the Chinese brush doctrines before, despite my inadequacy and being a poor student.  I decided that I was going to rid all shackles and just paint this time.

I chose a rather thick, very fibrous "leather" Xuan this time.  The fibers added texture and the thick leathery Xuan was absorbent, yet allowed the water to float a bit before being assimilated, not unlike watercolor paper.

The first rule I broke was to paint the water of the Falls.  Normally I would define the water with the negative void space.  In fact from what I was taught, the using of a white color to paint water was frowned upon.  Treating water by painting it was quite liberating.  In fact that was the very first thing I did, painting the water of the Falls, using lighter grades of ink intermingled in the titanium white streaks to signal a flow.

As for the cliffs from which the falls clung to, I used broad dabs of a mixture of colors, setting the base tones of the landscape and accenting particular colors to set the stage for the features that I planned to portray, i.e. mist, sky, top of the cliff etc.  At one of my painting lessons, I was asked to randomly splash red and phthalocyanine blue onto the Xuan paper and then tried to make some sense of the resulting splash pattern and create a landscape from these two colors.  I was employing the same principle with this painting, albeit the mix was a lot tamer. There were tons of overlapping brushstrokes, totally against the etiquette of not covering the previous brushstrokes as prescribed in a proper Chinese brush painting method.  Again, this was liberating.  I felt like I was doing an oil painting, and my thick leathery Xuan was a perfect cohort and took the abuse with such poise.

Oh, did I also confess that I cheated, well sort of, by sketching out with charcoal my Falls and the bridge etc. on the back of my translucent Xuan first?  It was much easier to follow the lines and paint on the top side, especially for the water.

I think some of the charcoal from the back of the paper might have gotten incorporated into the paper once the moisture from the top side reached it.  This actually worked out great, especially as far as the edges of the Falls and the silhouette of the bridge was concerned.  It added depth to the brushstrokes and rendered a 3-D effect.  Something I might need to explore in the future and warrant further experimentation. 

The painting actually didn't look half bad at this point.  I could have passed it for a blurry, mystic interpretation of the Falls?  But that wasn't what I set out to do, so forge on!

I intended a fall color for the Falls, thus the yellow dots were the base color for my cinnabar.

I seemed to have run into a dead end.  I didn't like the painting at this stage.  It felt like the landscape was dotted with bouquets of flowers instead of a fall foliage. I wished I had stopped at the stage when the painting looked kind of fuzzy.

Time to rest.  Give the painting a rest,  Give myself a rest. 

 

Mounting my demo pieces

I decided to mount the two pieces of paintings from the demo session at the wetlands.  I happened to pick the very fibrous and thick "leather" Xuan as the paper to paint on that day, so the mounting should be relatively easy.

I would be wet mounting them as usual.  I've discussed and debated with people concerning the dry silicone mounting method.  If I brought my hubris to the table, I would have said that the dry method was for those who either didn't know how to, or lacked the skill to do the wet mount.  I have personally tried both methods, and have even tried ironing commercial food wrap as a binder, but I've always preferred the wet mounting method, despite the many cumbersome steps it requires.  Call me a snob but there is a je ne sais quoi quality about a starched, perfectly stretched and flat piece of work from the wet mounting that dry mounting can never hold a candle to.  I would however use dry mounting if I chose to present my painting mounted under a piece of glass.  In that case I would have used the very thin, semi-sized "cicadas wing" Xuan as my painting paper, and the added reflective layer of the silicone binder provides a seemingly ephemeral, yet perceptive richness to the color and the translucent paper when viewed through the glass pane.  I guess that's what linseed oil does to color pigments.

The doors on my storage cabinet are covered with smooth mylar, perfect as a mounting surface.

Being a good student of wet mounting, I even included a blow hole provision on the right side of the mount.  Supposedly one is to blow through this passage such that the wet painting is lifted from the mounting surface ever so slightly, to prevent sticking from any bleed through starch.  I personally have found this to be more academic than practical.  The lifting seems to occur around the blow hole area only.  Perhaps I am not doing this correctly or that I need more than one blow hole. In reality I've almost never encountered any paintings stuck on the mounting surface when dried.

Depicting a straw connected to the blow hole 

The dried paintings were taken off the mounting surfaces and stamped with my seals and were ready to be framed.

So I examined the landscape painting and noticed my geese were bigger than the water buffaloes. Hence scale wise it seemed like I failed, in a hurry or not, during that 30 minutes demo.  But logically, I could dig myself out by saying that the painting represented a view from a drone flying overhead, with the geese much closer to the lens than the buffaloes.  Right?  How else could the distant background be placed so far up in the painting, composition wise.  Could this be the scattered focal point perspective in play?  Hmmmmmmmmmm.