Scatter Brain

In this painting I wanted to paint a bridge next to a lily pond.  My original premise was that the bridge is almost silhouette like, swallowed in rolling fog, like a ghost ship in vast sea. It is the lily pond in the foreground that shall work as a lead-in to the scene, and sent up the perspective and the contrast to the vessel in the back. 

An issue that I have considered in painting the lily pond is that if I had painted all the stalks of  wilted lilies and reeds, the viewer would be bombarded with so much information and will make the scene quite messy.  This is along the same vein that I have alluded to in my Feng Sui blog.

Went back to my playbook and deployed my old trick again.....Ancient Chinese Secret Solution (alum solution).  As you recall, alum solution is used for sizing paper, works like a resist in watercolor works.   I therefore proceeded to paint with this alum solution to form most of the wilted lily stalks and their reflections.  After the wash is laid on it, the painted alum shows up as void spaces that hints of the presence of stalks, without these discrete black lines to jam your visual cortex.  What I was able to do was to create a "presence" without the usual boundaries, or harshness.  I picked a few strategic locations in plant my foreground, my vivid lotus stalks.   I thought that worked rather well in this setting.

What I have not followed through was the original premise.  Where was my Flying Dutchman?  I was too carried away in laying out the dead sticks in the pond, that my fingers took on a life of their own and started to paint a setting sun, and trees, and a cow and .......

Before I realized it, I had embellished too much onto my painting.  I got off on the wrong ramp, and how do I extricate myself now ?  This is when I decided to put in highlights on some of the foliage and the back of the cow herder to playoff the setting sun.  I can only lament.... what a scatter brain.



DON'T CROSS ME

I was showing a beginner how to paint bamboo.  This person painted quite a few vertical stalks of bamboo, consequently a lot of them crossed each other, and the painting looks like a wire mesh (exaggeration)!
 The remedy is to control the angle where the stems intersect.  Make those angles acute, and as far away from 90 degrees as possible.  Another remedy would be to hide the point of convergence with leaves.

I then used my Blue Heron painting as an example.  The blades of grass are bound to intersect with each other.  What I did was to deliberately wet that juncture with water to cause the ink to bleed.  The diffused ink helps to soften those corners.


To show the effect without the diffused ink, I used "PAINT" program to erase the bleeding ( I don't know how to Photoshop that out).  Hopefully you would agree with me that the one with the bled ink looks better.

I then totally erased the grass to see what the painting would present itself............................ well, what do you think?

Ghosts From Yesteryears

I decided to clean out my pigsty in preparation for the upcoming Portland Open Studios tour and came across some stashed away Opus Magnums from my past.  Oh my gosh these were done in 2003.  I remembered buying a box of water color tubes out of the blue and a booklet of papers and ventured into the world of painting. It appeared that I made no attempts to mix the colors, not surprising since I did not have a color pallet. It almost seemed like I painted straight out of the tubes.  Interestingly I was using aluminium foil as a surface for mixing colors when I first took lessons.

These images are like your baby pictures.  So untouched and natural.  You can tell that they are infantile, and yet soooooo innocent

Calligraphy and Painting

There are people who asserted that calligraphy is the basis for all Chinese brush work, including brush painting.  For me, this statement is quite true, especially now that I am attempting to teach people how to paint with a Chinese brush.

I had done some form studies on heron, and I've decided on adding calligraphy to  them.  The calligraphy will be used not in a narrative sense, i.e. telling a story about the herons, nor is it a poem about herons, but is used as a complementary tool to inspire and to augment the form of the heron.

 

 

 

In this work, the calligraphy which is in the cursive style  is done as a very faint background, so as not to distract from the main pictorial outlay, but its subtleties help to bring out the dance form of the herons.  Notice the single leg stance of one, and the ballerina like stance of the other.  The motion and energy of the main characters are derived from the calligraphy, and vice versa.

Wanderlust

Songs and Hymns
soar to the Heavens

This moment fills me
intoxicates me

I surrender myself to wanderlust




The above is a rough translation of the Chinese writing in the painting.   This style is called  the "grass style" or "sloppy style"  of the Chinese cursive writing.

This flowing style of calligraphy matches quite nicely with the very raw and bold form of interpretation of a bird.  No attempt was made to hide or ameliorate the brush strokes.  This really is the essence of the Xieyi style of Chinese brush painting......concrete thoughts, but free brushes.  

Good or bad, let it all hang out

Calligraphy

translation:

If
LIFE  is not witnessed by the present moment
then
when does

Living
is
to be able to
Do As You Wish

Isn't Being Cute Enough?

In the routine of preparing materials for tutoring, I have to answer a fundamental question about Chinese Brush painting, and that is "Isn't being cute enough?"

The word "cute" can embody a broad interpretation, but I shall use it in the context that it attracts an audience. Case in point is some of the so called Chinese Brush paintings one sees on the net or fair vendors are often crowned with the verbage "Isn't that cute?". I shall use paintings of bamboo to illustrate my point.

Bamboo is one of the 4 required proficiencies for people studying the floral theme in Chinese Brush painting (the others are plum flower, orchid and chrysanthemum). Bamboo is a study of many virtues in the Chinese philosophy. It is stiff, yet flexible. It bends but does not break. It is strong, yet hollow. It symbolizes an ideal personality, being forthright, without being conceited. Being flexible without being manipulated. Appears to be hard and cold, and yet has the room inside and the capacity to accept.

Thus the proper way to paint a bamboo is always straight up, stern and yet not overbearing. It must show the virtues, then one goes about the business of composition, where to park the leaves and the branches. Bamboo is a plant of the grass family, and yet the branches and the main stalks are always straight or bow like, ready to bounce back, and never bend and twist like noodles. The segments are usually painted using the bone method, usually using straight tip. The rings around the segments are very specific in the sense that it shows the remnant of the sheaths of the shoot. It also tells you whether you are look up or down the bamboo by whether is arch is an upward bow or a downward bow.

My experience with painting bamboo is very limited. I've only done my obligatory homework pieces when I was taking lessons. I used bamboo as a teaching subject because it truly is the most fundamental way to learn Chinese Brush strokes. It teaches one how to hide or show the points, straight tip, twisted tip, press and lift and all that jazz. In essence, one does not "paint" a bamboo, but "writes" a bamboo, because it requires the application of all the basic methods of the brush. Every segment of a bamboo painting can be broken down and reassembled in some Chinese calligraphy. It is like a basic Kata in martial arts. One has to learn a few basic moves to execute the Kata.

The left picture is the "cute" visualization of the bamboo, but is very unbecoming of the brush art because it answers to all the bad qualities of a bamboo painting. The branches and leaves are twisted, looking more like true grass than bamboo. The segments are not done right and the rings are feeble attempts to point, press, draw and lift. Yet these types of bamboo drawings are quite prevalent in greeting card stores, book markers. Yes they are cute, albeit not done correctly with the Chinese Brush strokes.

The picture on the right is the more accurate way of painting a bamboo using the Chinese brush. It showed the bone structure, the correct brush stokes and a gradient in ink tone. However it also has a lot of boo boos, i.e. the thin branches failed to separate and the nodes fused together, looking like a rope with knots on it. The leaves on the left hand side should be pointing downward instead of up.

So the six million dollar question is..... can "cute" and "proper" co-exist? I suppose this is not necessary an ideological debate. In our vernacular, does the word cute mean more than being pretty and fetching? More importantly I suppose, is "cuteness" what an artist seeks?

I suppose this is my fervent attempt to bring to light what Chinese Brush painting is about and ask all of us to be a more educated audience, so that we can all truly appreciate the art form, without the facade of being "cute".