Purity, Resiliency and Transformation

As I am continuing my doodling, I couldn't help but be reminded of the tidbits of trivia relating to Lotus. 

Lotus plant has many uses, besides its beauty.  Lotus root (actually the rhizome) is often sliced and used in stir fry dishes in Chinese restaurants.  Sometimes the whole rhizome is stuffed with rice and other goodies and steamed and then sliced up before serving. The dried rhizome can be milled to flour and used like corn starch, which can be cooked as a sweet broth with Longan and red prunes, a popular dessert drink.  The nodes of the rhizome when mashed is used to treat nosebleed. 

The lotus seed, or Lianzi (蓮子) is a homonym for the Chinese phrase which means "a succession of sons" (連子) thus is often used as an auspicious garnish in weddings.  The lotus seed heart (germ) is very bitter and is used as a tea or tonic for its "fire lowering" property; in other words, less Yang.

The leaves of the lotus plant are used as wrappings for food preparation.  The popular dim sum dish of Lo Mai Gai or Lotus Leaf Rice is one such example.  Another famous dish, the Begger's Chicken uses the leaves to wrap the whole chicken before encasing it in clay and baked.  The leaves impart a fragrance to the food inside.  

Culturally speaking, Lotus is the national flower of India and Vietnam.  The Guanyin bodhisattva is portrayed as standing or sitting on a lotus bed holding a lotus flower in her hand.  The famous Big Buddha sculpture in Hong Kong shows the Buddha resting on a bed of lotus blossoms.  

Lotus represents the virtues of purity, resiliency and transformation.  It's self-explanatory when such beauty emerges from a muddy bog.  I personally think that any painting of lotus should bear those thoughts in mind.  Whimsical versions of lotus paintings trivialize the reverence of this flower, regardless of how artistic or innovative they might be.  This is just my own cultural bias. 

I suppose one way to adhere to the traditional ways of interpreting the flower is to recall all the rote learning notes from yesteryears.  Don't re-invent the wheel. 

Lines are used to depict petals, with the tip of the petals darkened to emphasize pointed tips.

Side tip brushstrokes are used in this version to describe the petals.  The brush is loaded with white and crimson at the tip of the brush to facilitate the natural transition of the hues.  

Trying out different brushstroke speeds to try to show various personalities.  The brush does not lie. It most definitely will reveal if one is gingerly and methodically laying down a brushstroke or doing it with aplomb and a free spirit. 

In the end I am rewarded with something that when cropped perhaps is worth a spot on my walls.

I have 2 choices,

or 

I settled for the portrait format, although I do like the landscape format too.  It has an interesting perspective of the leaves. 

I have a shadow box which I had intended for displaying my carved calligraphy on spaghetti squash (my blog titled Playtime), but it is too shallow.  I am going to use it for my lotus painting. 

My doodling housed in a shadow box,
 

Unto dust thou shalt return, from mud, thou shalt emerge

I had accumulated a few pages of doodling over the week, and it seemed a waste to commit them to garbage.  I decided to go through them and see if I could mine something usable from them.  With judicious cropping and framing, I was able to assemble a few pieces for my viewing pleasure.  Sort of like a gemologist picking and choosing and evaluating before the polishing. 

This was my least favorite piece.  It was too busy for my taste.  I felt like I was trying to fit all the plots into my story, but I didn't have a clear direction to where the story was going.  I was obfuscated, even after cropping away of extraneous objects. 

After I framed the doodling with a proper mat, the painting took on a different personality.  It appeared prim and proper now. 

I loved this one.  To me it was the simplicity.  For sure the proportion of the lotus leaf and the blossom and the dragonfly seemed not proper and perhaps the shapes were too impressionistic, yet none of that seemed to matter.  Fo me anyways.

I custom built a frame for this painting. I love the way it was dressed.  I forgot to mention that the painting was done on cicada skin Xuan, a very thin and translucent paper and I mounted this paper on canvas, instead of the usual route of mounting on Xuan.  The texture of the canvas came through the paper and to the untrained eye, one might have thought the painting was done on canvas to begin with. This added another layer of nuance to this simple doodling. 

The same three players filled the paper in this painting.  The dragonfly was done in a less impressionistic fashion though.  It showed more details and realism than the previous painting.

Gave it a proper housing,

The lesson I learned was that don't be too quick to write anything off.  A little cosmetic make-up might be all one needed.  

Doodling, feeling the itch

I haven't done any serious painting for quite a while. I passed my time working on my calligraphy piece with back-lighting while I was gravely ill.  It was mechanical and did not involve too many art cells.  I did some monkeying around with the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't fish piece just to amuse and humor myself.  I needed to pick up the brush again before it becomes a stranger to me.

I decided the best way to get my feet wet again was to not take things too seriously.  Doodling would be the ticket.

I had planted some water lilies in the pond behind my house.  I housed them in a container and put mesh on top of the container to keep ducks and geese away from the bulbs.  Thus, waterfowls and flowers were my favorite subject matters.  Unfortunately, my containers were all dug up and disposed of when the pond was dredged to make it deeper. I decided that I would do my doodling on flowers and perhaps a blue heron, since the heron had been visiting the pond for the bull frogs lately.  Lotus would be an interesting alternative to water lily to paint, since it is a favorite subject matter in Chinese painting and I had spent quite a few pieces of Xuan on them, upon the insistence of my teachers.  Learning by rote!  Lotus flowers symbolize the ability to rise above something that might be noxious and not pleasant (mud and dirty water) and still stand tall and blossom into something really elegant.

Different ways of painting the lotus leaf,

The blossom/bud, 

Incidentals like a dragonfly,

Definitely brought back memories.