Almost time for rabbits

The next zodiac animal is the rabbit, and our Lunar New Year falls on January 22 for 2023.  That means I better start planning on my zodiac painting now.

I love putting animals and birds into my painting, but rabbit is definitely a new subject for me.  My preparation involves just grabbing a piece of paper and start drawing with no particular agenda.  I hope to be conversant with the animal and hopefully I would be able to portray a personality to the rabbit, instead of just being vapid.  Vapid rabbit rhymes in spoken language, but not in paintings, ha ha.  

A Dog Day Afterenoon

I am finally back home.

All the travelling was fun, but like everything in my life I was rather passive about it.  I worry about expenditures, scheduling and travel companions.  Well it  just happened this time.  I wasn't planning on these trips.   Something that didn't "just happen" for a while was my painting.  I was not motivated.  Obviously doing brush painting on the road is not like rendering a pencil sketch.  To be honest, my heart really wasn't in it.  Strangely enough I don't feel too guilty about the hiatus.  Perhaps the stars had planned the absence for me, knowing how passive I am to seek it.

Well someone did nudge me a little lately.  Chinese New Year is approaching and I was asked to do demo again, as a program in a couple of the Lunar New Year celebration activities.  This will definitely help me get back onto the saddle.  The stars will not abandon me!

It is time I fill my brush wash basins with water and cut my Xuan into smaller pieces for my prep works.

This is going to be the year of the dog.  I've tried to paint dogs before I embarked on my journeys.  I was goofing around and tried painting on photo paper.  I quite enjoyed the process and the result wasn't too offending;  I was gratified by how vivid the paintings looked.  Yet I wanted to attempt a more traditional approach, and most of all, something simple.

In order to do a demo in front of a group, chances are 99 percent of the audience are novices.  This is not the time nor place to talk about techniques or aesthetics.  The process needs to be result oriented.
It needs to be fun, simple and guarantees a result; a presentable finished product.  In this case, the painting of a dog.

I thus gathered my thoughts and turned on my TV.  I am one of those lucky people who is not perturbed by noise.  The noisier the environment, the better I am able to concentrate.  I don't know if this is what happens when one lived in an urban jungle, or the fact the I grew up inhabiting a 500 sq.ft. flat with 6 other family members.  I often found myself studying not in the library, but a noisy restaurant; a bowling alley; a mall.  Silence scars me.  My mind wanders in the absence of stimuli.    I hate to admit it, but I sleep with my radio or TV on quite often.

I started to doodle with the TV chattering in the background;  trying to reacquaint myself with my brush and my Xuan.  The result was disastrous.

I had no control of the brushstrokes.  I had no control of the water content of my brush.

I was reminded, and humbled, by the fact that good calligraphic strokes are the basis of Chinese brush painting.  If I am still fighting this nightmare how am I going to sail through my demo and how do I expect the general public to do that?

Then I thought I would do something that employs more of a wash than just lines.  Everybody can splash, right?

That wasn't too bad.  It had spunk.

How about this one?

I was really trying to stay away from painting anything that came close to being a Shih Tzu or a Pekingese because I was trying to get out of the stereotype.  I was trying to not paint something banal.

I picked up a couple of New Year's greeting cards from a bookstore while I was travelling.

I am in no position to comment on the technical meritsof these cards, but I must admit that I was a little turned off by the dogs on them.  They seemed vapid and without a soul.  The same reason I am tepid about my dog paintings in the past blogs.  I know this is purely a very subjective opinion from me, but the question I asked myself would be: do I want this animal to be a representation of the auspicious year to come?

Puppies are so cute and I recall this little poodle mutt that I could relate to.  Perhaps I should paint something with a emotional content.  That is my motivation.  Now I have a beacon to guide me.

Well nobody said it was going to be easy.  But look at those big eyes and the tongue hanging out!
I might be onto something.

But seriously, I began to work on this feeling that I had.

It's going to the the year of the Dog.  Man's Best Friend!  A dog is loyal, trustworthy, always of service.  I need to be able to sell this as the harbinger of good fortune for the year to come.

I know the sketches looked rather haphazardly done, and they were, but I was really anxious to put down what I felt about the personality of the dog.  I could clean up my brushstrokes as I became more comfortable with myself.

Of course the motivation for my painting all these are always on my mind.  I have a job to do, and that is to allow an average person to successfully paint a dog.  I am challenging myself to paint something that can easily be converted to sort of "painting by numbers" and yet possesses a suggestion of artistic merit.  I am sending my hippocampus into overdrive.

What I need is a stencil.  A template.  Something that is repeatable.

I proceeded to work on this premise.  I drew an outline around my animal.

I wanted to explore the feasibility of such a template.

Adding Human Interest

It has been two years since I finished my Shadows painting (Chronicle Of Shadows) and it is still pinned on the drywall in my studio.  I normally would either mount my paintings or just throw them in a pile as my etudes.  In that particular blog I used the term epilogue, thinking that I had written the last chapter on this work and I would close the book.

Little did I know.

After two years of casting occasional glances, ruminating on the vibes of the painting, I am convinced that the painting needs dressing up.  My playing with light values and casting shadows was fun, a lot of fun.  Now it feels almost anti-climatic.

Isn't it time to smoke a cigarette?  Wink! Wink!  Ah but I've severed my friendship with tobacco!

I need to add some human interest to this painting.  I am thinking of adding a jogger, a couple, someone, on the path.

I must confess that I had entertained this thought from the very beginning.  I have this one artist who eschews cliche and would chide me for being "redundant" as I recall.  Having people on the pathway is so mundane.  Is it?  How does one decide what is vapid and what is "just right"?

It must have been a broadcast on public educational channels that showed neuroscientists employing transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to study how our brain deals with art.  Aside from a neuroaesthetic response, there seems to be a neuromotor response also.  Thus an image of a runner elicits a response from the area of the brain that controls our legs, though no physical movements from our own legs ensued.   We literally immerse ourselves in the picture.  Being a pharmacist with some biomedical knowledge, this topic intrigues me.  It would be interesting to study the different kinds of responses when we are subjected to various genres of subject matters.  Does ethnicity, culture and social economics have a say to which areas of the cortex is activated?  Why do some of my friends find a visit to the Grand Teton boring and others jubilating.  How is our preference of one thing over something else arrived at?  Does it have anything to do with dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is associated with pleasure; or oxytocin, the chemical that causes uterine muscle to contract amongst other things, and bonding.  So if we avoid something, is it due to an inhibition in these pathways?  I'm way off the subject now.

I suppose I should not be taking a reductionist point of view.  There are things that cannot be defined by a formula;  how and what we paint is one of them.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Now this is definitely cliche!

I decided to include a girl walking her dog in my Shadows painting.  Putting a person in the painting is what I call adding human interest, literally.   I now need to find out where's the best location to insert them.  I summoned the help of my clear vinyl sheet.

With that I have freedom in moving the subjects around to find an optimum size and location.  I started out by painting the girl and her dog on this clear sheet and placed it over my painting.

I added a different sized silhouette to gauge the fit.

Then I moved my clear sheet to a different location to decide

I finally decided to put them at the bend next to the edge of the path.  I particularly enjoyed how the dog's tail was serendipitously pointing towards the out swung hand of the girl.  A connection was made.  Whether the dog was leashed or not would remain an enigma.  To define that further would be trite.

In the end I assuaged my indecision whether to add the pedestrian by going off on a tangent with some logical excuses perhaps, but mostly by just painting it.  Perhaps the Shadows painting has lost its initial appeal and I can afford to take no prisoners the second time around?