Attempting a classical landscape painting

I kind of missed my yellow mountain piece after I toyed with it by adding a rising sun.  Perhaps I should settle down and work on another landscape painting; one that is more "classical".

Of course that is just me mumbling to myself.  I am not sure I fully understand the word "classical".  Can I reduce it to the simplest term, something that reminds me of the past?

I am reminded of the days when I was a student of Chinese brush painting and the hours spent in repeating and emulating everything that was in Mustard Seed Garden, hoping to my my work look "authentic" by being "classical".  Aside from the different brush techniques, I also learned the doctrines in classical landscape paintings, and one of those deals with perspective.  Scattered focal point is one thing, but more interestingly is the 3 perspective in the composition.  I am not referring to anything remotely related to say the vanishing point perspective.  Specifically the perspectives that govern landscape painting are the height perspective, the depth perspective and the level perspective.

Height perspective is as it suggests, the perspective of dealing with height, how the viewer is to perceive altitude.  Hence the peaks have to be soaring, and cliffs precipitous. The so called "level" perspective is actually what we would construe as the depth perspective; how to distinguish near objects from objects that are farther away.  Our depth perspective actually describes what goes on from near to far.  In other words, the painting needs to show not only the relative distance between objects, but how these objects are linked.  By placing person pushing a cart on a trail around a bend going behind a hill is a good example of our "depth perspective".  The artist fabricates an event or story line that directs the viewer's attention from foreground to background.   I personally deem this the most unique thing about "classical" landscape painting. 

Certain requisite features are often present in a "classical" landscape.  One will almost always find boulders, hills, mountains, streams, water, mist, waterfall, outcrops dotting the scenery.  From there one sometimes can see incidentals like shacks, vessels, foot bridges, animals etc.  A flat platform is sometimes included to add interest.  I was taught dots form lines, and lines form planes. So the ability to describe a plane, often sitting on top of a precipitous is one way to showcase the artist's proficiency.  This is no different from a pianist or violinist demonstrating their virtuosity when playing the cadenza during a concerto.   

Yes, there are indeed a lot of things to look for when enjoying a classical landscape painting.  And yes, it can be quite pedantic.  

I often grabble with the notion of a contemporary painting "classical" landscape because somehow I identify that as the product of rote learning and one is just regurgitating what someone did years ago.  I certainly understand that some of the "classical" landscape is impressionistic and full of symbolism, that the peak is the emperor and  he is adorned by his subjects. Nonetheless I would prefer us contemporary practitioners painting something real and that people can relate to, or moved by, as well as being beautiful.

Having said that, my assignment for myself, my so called "classical" landscape, shall adhere to the things I've learned as a student ( most of it anyways) and still harbor a bit of truth, as in real landmarks?

More aptly, I am borrowing a "classical" setting to house modern day landmarks.

I hark back to my trips to Taiwan, a couple of places in particular, that could fit into my landscape painting.  One of those places is Jiufen ( Jiufen Old Street) and the other is the Sun Moon Lake, where Ci En Pagoda is located.

This is a photo I took of a temple by the bus stop up by Jiufen.

and this is a photo of the Ci En Pagoda at Sun Moon Lake,

A common format of Xuan paper has the 2:1 ratio, the height being twice the width.  So I am loosely following this particular format.  I am painting on the Cicada skin Xuan.  It is more forgiving with my less than stellar techniques.  

I am putting the temple from Jiufen in the foreground, and the Pagoda in the middle ground, and the background shall be a continuation of the mountain range.

I am using the classical ways to paint trees and shrubs, as depicted by the venerable Mustard Seed Garden.  I am leaving a lot of spaces between my different objects.  My intention is to fill in with leaves and dots.  Something impressionistic and spontaneous, to break up the solemnness of a "classic".

I am placing tall trunks on the paper for my trees.  They could be lodge pole pines or firs, but for now they appear more birch-like.  Oh well, that's not important.  I've done such tall trees in my Multnomah Falls paintings, and trees are abundant in the Pacific Northwest, so that's something I can relate to.  For heaven's sake, I was once employed by a plywood mill. 

I have included a flat platform with a trail at the bottom.  I am a good student.  But seriously, that footpath is my adherence to the depth perspective.  The viewer's attention shall, hopefully,  follow that path to somewhere behind the foreground, and attempt to imagine "what's behind that."

Making it real now, coloring the temple, using my photo as reference. 

Rusalka-Song to the moon

I am looking at the Rusalka painting with bamboo added on the left edge of the paper.  I do like the brushstrokes of the bamboo leaves and take comfort in knowing that I haven't lost that skill.  I would like the bamboo to be a bit more substantial; a bit more prominent, that is.  The bamboo looks puny the way it is.

I believe the expanded bamboo makes the setting more intimate and adds another dimension to the scenery.  The leaves also blend well with the visible fibers of the fibrous Xuan that I am using.   The viewer can accept the presence of the fibers as a matter of fact instead of them being a distraction or imperfection.  I mean one should not object to veins in a slab of marble or markings on a piece of knotted pine stock.  The reason I am making a fuss about this little detail is that a gallery personnel  actually tried to document the locations of the visible fibers on a painting of mine  during the check-in process.  I was told this is for their protection; to avoid being blamed for "defacing" the painting.  I honestly don't know if this is a case of being ignorant or an abundance of caution.  Perhaps this only happens in a litigious society like ours.  Who is one being pedantic now?

I am adding a blue ring to the moon, making it more cartoonish.  I think it makes a bigger impact to my painting this way.  The moon is part of the title and needs a little flair. 

The shadows and reflections off the front of the pavilion is darkened and made more saturated, to offer more drama to the lights.

The huge light area just beneath the shore seems out of place, almost like a dissonant chord.  I would interpret that as an anomaly of the water and draws attention away the painting.   I desperately need to tone it down.   

A few strokes of purple color seems to ameliorate the problem.  That patch is a lot less intrusive and could pass for the reflection of the night sky on the water.

I am increasing the saturation of the color to render a more retrospective feel to the painting.  The light values on the face of Rusalka is further tuned to account for the direction of the moon, with special attention given to the forehead, the tip of the nose, the chins and most importantly, the sternocleidomastoid muscles.   The highlights of shimmers of water around Rusalka is done at an angle to give an illusion of proximity, effectively placing her closer to the viewer than parallel lines would suggest.

I feel like I am designing a set for the stage rather than doing a painting.

Finishing up my Jade Rabbits on the Moon

Now that I have the main residents situated on the moon, it is time to paint in the background. As I had alluded to before, the inspiration for this composition is the mythology of the shadows on the moon representing the dwelling of Chang'e and her rabbit.  I am therefore needing to exploit the shadows.  I am choosing to paint a classical pine tree with its branches matching the shadows.  I am also placing the branches strategically so that they take up and blend in with some of the bigger pieces of fibers on the paper.  

I need to add a branch to account for the shadows in the middle of the moon

I now paint in the branches of the pine tree.  Notice how the big piece of fiber on the upper right side is painted into part of the branch.  I don't want to trivialize the word "organic", but this is as organic as one gets.

So the tree and stuff looks a little sparse for shadows.  A little dressing up with a broad brush wash and dabbing resolves that issue.  I am happy that the details of the tree and branches etc. are well blended into the shadows.  That allows more room for the viewer to conjure up their own interpretation of the tree. 

Putting some rouge on the face of the moon.  She looks pretty now.  

 

One of my non-Asian friend looks at the work and says "you have a bonsai tree in there".  "How astute!" I tell her.  Bonsai comes from the Chinese word Penzai, or Penjing which literally means the craft of artistically staging potted plants.  As I am painting a rabbit within the framework of Chinese mythology, a Chinese style pine tree is called for.  Pine trees are symbols of longevity.  The twisted and knurly branches are more than aesthetic poses; they also pertain to the ability of withstanding adversity and thriving despite of it.   Actually within the framework of Chinese mythology the tree on the moon is purported to be an osmanthus.  However some scholars would refute that and claim the tree to be Cinnamomum pedunculatum and not osmanthus.  Hopefully my pine is not going to be ridiculed. 

I am now at the juncture of a self-imposed dilemma.  I had intended to just do silhouettes of trees and rabbits as the shadows on the moon and I had no intention of depicting any three dimensional realism to the rabbits.  So I am now debating whether to paint in the eyes of the rabbits.  I am just being an idiot, getting hung up on something that is now irrelevant, especially since I've come so far down the road of realism.

Then I am reminded of the fact that our dragon boats go through the ceremony of painting the eyeballs in on the day of the races.  Eyeballs give the dragons life and spirit.  It would be quite a taboo for me to turn in something that purportedly is nice and auspicious; pertaining to the coming New Year and yet is lacking eyeballs.  What would rabbits without eyeballs portend?

I can't help but recall the New Year's card sent out by a local Chinese tourist/cultural venue.  The fact that this institution is not run by Chinese is beside the point, but they asked some poor Chinese person to paint them a New Year's card for the Year of the Rat and sent them out to all their sponsors and partners.

The quality of the painting notwithstanding but the fact that this card was used to welcome the year of the Rat is deplorable.  Can you imagine a New Year with two vermin eating up your food staple?  Come on people, this is not the time to be cute.  Find something auspicious to depict the rats.  This was such a taboo, especially if one is just a little bit superstitious.  Yes customs can be pedantic.  Look what happened to the year 2020, the year of the Rat!

I shall not and will not be guilty of painting New Year's zodiac animals with no eyeballs!

Who's being pedantic

I explored the availability of a power outlet during a painting demonstration planning session.  I needed a hair dryer for my gig.

Chinese Brush painting is not unlike watercolor in some ways.  We might be calling our techniques by different names but they are referencing the same principles.  We are all dealing with the collective results of  water, color and paper.

Xuan paper is the preferred paper we paint on and the absorbency of the paper is affected by whether it is sized or unsized with alum and the type of fibers that the paper is made from.  The ability to control ink tone is one of the virtues we look for in a brush artist.

Feathering in watercolor involved forming a gradient that goes from saturated to more transparent by adding water to diffuse the color.  In Chinese brush painting the diffusion can go both ways.

This is an example of saturated to light, or rich into light in our vernacular.  The addition of ink or color onto a still wet brushstroke created the effect often employed for painting duckweed in Chinese painting

Clean water is applied around the hairline to promote ink diffusion, to make the brushroke more fluffy.  It is not uncommon for Chinese Brush artists to hold two brushes in their hands, one with ink and the other one just a plain wet brush.

Here is an example of the opposite, light into rich.  Brush with clean water is placed in still moist dark spots to create the voids

The following is an example of using stale ink ( the ink becomes more viscous due to evaporation, but the binder in the ink has also settled out somewhat )  The dark spot tends to stay put where as the water content from the ink seeps outward to form a clear margin.

An example of  blooms by painting with coffee.  This reminds me of water stain from a leaky roof.  I
suspect the suspended fine coffee particles helped to create the dramatic border.

Unsized Xuan is more apt to record these gradients as the paper is more "indelible", relatively speaking.  It traps all the nuances of a brushstroke.  Sized or semi-sized paper on the other hand allows the ink or color to float a little bit longer before being latched on by the fibers, thus any gradients formed are usually more homogeneous and with smooth transition.

This is where my hair dryer comes into play.  I use it for many reasons; hastening the drying time notwithstanding.   Daft antics it is not.   I use it as if it was the stop bath in the darkroom.

Anybody who has ventured into a photo darkroom knows to take the photo paper out of the developer once the ideal amount of silver grains are formed and move it to the acidic stop bath to halt the chemical reaction.   Thus once I've attained an ideal diffusion or gradient with my ink or color, I would summon the power of heat and airflow to dry up my brushstroke to prevent further diffusion.
Thus instead of using a chemical, I use a tool; a hair dryer.

So my idea of using a hair dryer was not well received.  People had no access to electricity or a hair dryer in the old days was the reason given.

To simply loathe the idea of borrowing from relevant technology is beyond me.  Why must we pretend to be living in the past to be authentic.  Does dressing up in faux period wardrobe make us more credible?  Must we foster the stereotype of ancient Chinese to be convincing?  Should we be luddites?

I'm sure name chop carvers didn't have access to power tools or computer aided graphics back in the old days.  Should we be cooking our own soot and not use color dispensed from a tube when painting?  So why the double standard.  I mused, philosophically of course, how would the Witches Dance sound like in Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique if violins were not allowed to be played col legno.  How dare we strike the strings with the back of the bow?

For the eerie effects, your Honor!

A Duan inkstone was presented as a show and tell piece.  The inkstone is produced from stones of Zhaoqing, Guangdong.  Duan is the ancient name for today's Zhaoqing.  Duan Yan ( Yan means inkstone in Chinese) is known for the fineness of its stone, thus it is not detrimental to the brush and for its ability to produce a nice ink suspension, given the right ink stick.  Of course the ethereal workmanship and decoration motif must also be mentioned.

An expert immediately proclaimed that this inkstone can store ink overnight without the ink drying out and that it can produce 7 colors/tones of ink.

Chinese consider ink as a color, but the color of the ink refers to the different gradients and appearance of the ink spot.  Thus the ink is dark, light, watery, scorched, or stale. Commonly the 5 colors are meant to remind us that we need to have variations in ink tones.  Stale ink is interesting in that the ink is left out to evaporate and becomes more viscous.  At the same time the binder in the ink settles out a bit so the resulting solution diffuses with a prominent clear margin around the dark area due to the less amount of binder in the solution.  The contemporary paint Huang Binhong established the canon of 5 brushstroke methods  and 7 ink colors.  He added the interpretation of ink that is accumulated through repeated applications and scorched ink on a mostly dry brush to be written very slowly to allow the residue moisture from the brush to slowly seep out.

Thus the color/tone of the ink refers to how the ink is treated and applied and really has nothing to do with the inkstone per se.   As far as storing the ink without it drying out, it has more to do with relative humidity and dew point and the porosity of the stone.

Invariably the conversation veers to the type of brush we paint with.  The same expert gave some eyebrow raising comments.  The brush hairs are from the "autumn hair" of animals, meaning the hair that animals/birds grew in autumn in anticipation of impending winter, he uttered.  Autumn hair is a literal translation from the Chinese words 秋毫.  It means fine long hair.  It is used metaphorically to describe something that is minuscule and detailed.  These 2 words are used in the context when a person discerningly examine details, the individual is examining autumn hair.  A disciplined regiment who does not pilfer its citizens is said to not violate a single autumn hair.  Someone who masters the brush art is said to have wicked beauty permeating to the tip of the autumn hair.  It is plausible that such hair was employed for brush making in ancient history, or that the creme de la creme brush still uses such niche material, but to hype and exaggerate all Chinese brush as such is entirely unethical and not warranted.  I think.

Of course the audience oohed and aahed in bewilderment.

Must we routinely mystify and embellish our art and implements in order to gain accreditation?  Aren't the facts interesting and revealing by themselves?  Are we living vicariously through these half truths to justify the present?  Have we become snake oil peddlers?

Have I turned into a polemicist?

Who's being pedantic?

When Is It Too Much Information

The classical Chinese garden in town asked for permission to use my rams painting for promotional purpose.  Obviously that was a feather in my hat, a shot in my arm.

I had done Chinese Brush demonstration for them in the past, so I dug up some of the drafts I did then.  The pavilion always interests me, so I shall do another one.

I really went to town with this one.

I was painting in a lot of details  Defined boulders at the pond's edge, well dressed Taihu stone, trees, shrubs, you name it.

I gave the darkest ink tone to the my main character, the pavilion.  The leaves that grew over the pavilion tiles and the lighter ink tone tiles in the back helped to describe distance.  I even employed a photography trick by painting in dabs of diffused ink on the right, not only to frame the scene but the out-of-focus look pushed the painting further back.

I tried to circumvent the busy content by employing a very simple color scheme, and I was selective in which objects to color.  All the while looking for complement and contrast.

At this point the painting still had that raw appearance and was begging for a finishing touch.
I thus painted in the reflections and shaded in the covered corridors in the background.

It is interesting to compare this work with my previous attempts.

My first attempt turned out to be the most vivacious, I mused.   I was driven by a notion and I tried to bring it out with my brush.  It had that unadulterated innocence. Simple brushstrokes described the pavilion roof ribs, tiles, boulders, Taihu stone etc.  The audience was given a lot of freedom to conjure up whatever they wanted to see or feel.

My second trial had a lot more information.  The roof tiles were painted in. There were a lot more lines to depict the boulders, the Taihu stone and I was even trying to line the leak window in the covered breezeway!   Instead of nurturing a notion, I was trying to reinvent a painting.

My urge to give full accounting of the scene drowned me out.  I wandered further away from what inspired me in the first place and got caught up by the nitty-gritty.  I seem to recall reading somewhere that Chinese Brush is sparse in details, lines and outlines are used to shape images with little shading or reference to light values.

Whereas I am not necessary pedantic with regards to the "doctrines" of Chinese Brush; whereas I am totalling accepting the Western influence and believe in the evolution of the Chinese Brush art form in today's environment, I sometime wonder if I drank the kool aid.

 Perhaps I paid too much attention to the photograph that I took of this place.  Don't blame the kool aid.