Tradition, Tradition !

No I am not Tevye.  Isn't Fiddler On The Roof a wonderful piece of work!

In teaching my students about the basics of brush strokes, and Chinese Brush Painting in general, I cannot circumvent some fundamental painting techniques.  To make my case more poignant, I have to fall back on a favorite subject matter, the orchid.  Orchid is touted as one of the 4 "PALS" in Chinese painting, possessing the virtue of lady like elegance and arrogance.

There is a very hierarchical way of depicting orchid.  The insert is a page from my instructional material.

The lower half of the diagram dissects the composition of the orchid leaves.  It has to have a "master" leaf and a "slave" leaf and these two cast a general orientation of the plant.  The "master" and the "slave" leaves must form a "phoenix eye" at the base.  A third leaf ( No. 3 in the diagram) must break out from this "phoenix eye" to dictate the height of the plant.   In other words, if these 3 elements are not arranged in this prescribed fashion, then the painting is a failed one, or the artist has not done his/her homework.  In some ways, such paintings have absolutely nothing that remotely resemble a studio "still life" or an on location plein-air rendition of the plant, but more to do with the discipline of floral design and arrangement.  After all, the painting of orchid can be construed as an euphemistic expression of virtues and beauties.

Such conformity to "Tradition" in a way stifles the advancement of Chinese Brush Painting.  At the very least, it lends to create the impression that Chinese brush paintings seem to copy each other.  This is especially confusing with the influx of mass produced pieces of "art".  Yet if the artist was to be divorced from this tradition, then he/she could be inviting a brow beating and deemed being ignorant of the basics.

My intention here is to neither advocate, nor to destroy the adherence to "rules".  I am just trying to stir up discussion as to what is deemed "correct" or "incorrect", especially for the new enthusiasts in Chinese Brush Painting.  I encourage you to find your own orchids in the library, at your local galleries and research on the net and see for yourself.  Whether chop suey is Chinese food or not depends on your own sophistication.

Xanadu Part 2

I've decided to revise my Xanadu painting a little bit.  I wanted to see if I could make it less "rigid" and perhaps more impressionistic.  I also wanted a wide angle presentation to facilitate a feeling of not being on a leash.

The above picture is my attempt at that goal.  The picture was taken when the Xuan paper was still wet, thus the colors were more saturated.

The next photo shows the same painting with calligraphy on it.  The writing is better than the original Xanadu, but in touching up a tree in the foreground, I made the lines too busy.  Wish I had controlled my OCD

a little better.

O Well.



As the image of hills and streams still churns in my cranium, I very quickly grabbed my brush and used whatever happened to be in my color dish and plotted out a mountainous mass with flowing lines as the liquid companion.  I basked in the initial delight of painting something altogether different, but quickly succumbed to the O Too Bland syndrome.  Found my split hair brush and started to plant my trees here and there, which ruined the "unleashed" feel of the painting.   This need for decoration caused me to write with more distinct edges in my calligraphy.  The resulting fonts perhaps seemed more curvaceous, but appeared to be anorexic.

Life is a process of reincarnating events.  An initial  attempt in painting a tranquil misty coastal forest led me to a chance encounter of a poem that mentioned Xanadu, and now this poem steered me into extracting another painting.  My lament is that quite often I grasp the light bulb alright but I could not make it shine.  I have maintained that a good painting is the amalgamation of a bunch of good accidents.  Yes I am a disciple of fate, and I shall patiently wait my turn.

Xanadu

20 mph sustained easterly wind.  41 mph gusts.  I kept focusing on the pine tree that is listing at a 60 degree angle in my backyard.   The swaying image of the scaly red branches is morphed by the streaks of raindrops running across my window pane ........ as if watching an old VCR tape with noise on the picture.

I decided to paint something a little more tranquil!

Needless to say, trees became my subject.  A forest of tall firs, punctuated by an occasional alder, bathed in a coastal shroud of fog.  An initial groundwork of laying down the tracks of trees proved to be a little too harsh for my imagination.  The body of trees seemed too concrete.  I had loaded my brush with ink in the belly, green around the torso and bits of yellow on the shoulder for that highlight.  As my brush grinds across the paper, the stops became too labored and the result was not "Xieyi" enough.    Perhaps my stops were too uniform, too calculated.  Something needs to be done about it.

I started to layer more colors and hues onto the green ribbons, hoping to mitigate some of the choppiness.

I have also started to paint in the main harness of some of these firs.  I wanted the shape of my brush strokes to suggest a general morphology, and the specific reveal of branches to affirm the recognition.  I've also decided the painting  is too cold, so I warmed up the fog a bit.

The next task is trying to decide what to do with all that empty space.  In my Serene Lake painting I had left the space on purpose...... in fact the whole painting was about empty space and about day dreaming but this piece somehow is not conducive to that task.  I almost went for the old formula of painting a faint peak in the distance.  For sure K2 would look good.    Here I am appealing  to dare to deviate from the prescribed compositions, from the old decoration scheme.

I came upon this poem in my calligraphy class material, and it was written out in the cursive style.  Both the font and the meaning of the poem mesh well with the painting, so I decided to use it.  A rough translation of the poem is
                   The existence of angels is a myth
                   Xanadu ( or Shangri-la, euphemism ) is a farce
                   But do capture the winding waters and mountains
                   And display their beauties for all to admire

Too bad my calligraphy here sucked, and my Xieyi painting seemed too contrived, but look at this as a down payment for something better.
                 

Southpaw

Have you  played Ping-Pong with a lefty and be victimized by the weird english?  Do you think pitching to a left handed hitter is the same as a right-hander?  Why does sinister mean left?  These are interesting questions to mull over.... until you are faced with it.

My former painting teacher once confided in me his frustration with a student.  He could not get the student to use the correct brush strokes, which is the foundation of Chinese brush painting.  It took me almost half an hour to coax my teacher to tell me that this student is left handed.  So what, you ask.

To those of you who have toyed with the Speedball nibs for calligraphy, you would understand that the natural right-handed slant of the pen, plus the nib's plane, makes the fine and thick lines of the alphabet . A left-hander would be unable to scribe these letters without turning the page 90 degrees to align the slant of the strokes with the slant of the nib.
As I ruminated on the implication of that awkward scenario, my first impression was that the brush should be exempt from that.  The brush possesses no rigid plane, thus it is free to script whatever it wants to.  There is nothing farther from the truth than this assumption.  If we take a look at my last blog; at the picture where it showed a transition from center tip to side tip as one writes a "7", this task is done with ease for a right handed person.  The brush would indeed assume a natural right slant, and we would move in the east-west axis to start out with.  For a left-hander, the brush assumes the opposite slant, and would be rubbing against the direction of travel, i.e. reverse tip.  The last blog "Ridgetop Explained" also suggested that the vertical "side tip" contour line describes the thickness of the object and thus for a right handed person, this is accomplished with flowing ease.  For a southpaw however, this is done against the orientation of the brush hair.  For a left-hander to do what we do, this person must turn the wrist completely inwards to cradle the brush, in order to achieve the same brush alignment  and slant  as the right handed person. 

(right handed body segments)

To better illustrate this point, I used the painting of a shrimp as an example.  The body of this arthropod is done with side-tip strokes;  as if drawing a fat arc, with the longer radius to the right. 
When I asked a left handed person to do this, the arc is painted with the opposite curvature, i.e. the longer radius now on the left side, despite the same body orientation.

(left-handed body segments)

I must say that I was ecstatic when I observed this.  It validated my theory, and vindicated the left handed persons.. ....... the teacher was frustrated because he did not understand the mechanics of the hand .. ...the student was frustrated because she was either blamed for not following directions, or was told to turn the paper upside down just to comply.

What is the remedy??  The southpaw should still learn the basics  and be able to execute the different brushstrokes, but also understand that most of the paintings that we take in are done by right handed people, with a right handed bias in their strokes.  My solution of teaching the southpaw is that as we learn from emulating the works of ancient masters, we could flip their works along the vertical axis.  Thus our right becomes their left !!    I am encouraging left handed people to digitally flip the masterpieces, and then learn to paint with the same strokes.  In essence, a center tip stroke that started from the left to right, turning downward and transitioning to a side-tip would now be a center tip stroke from right to left (aligning perfectly with the natural left handed slant), and transitioning to a side-tip down stroke. 

Confusing?  Only for a right-hander.  I think the southpaws know what I am talking about.

Ridgetop Explained

Now that I am done with the Portland Open Studio event and my son's wedding, I have a little more time to write my blogs. Having a student or two to teach has actually taught me a few things. The task at hand now is how to convey in a clear and succinct manner so there is an actual transfer of knowledge. We often harbor a notion, a concept that we somehow intrinsically know, but are unable to verbalize. Since so much emphasis in Chinese brush painting is placed upon Bi-Fa (method of the brush), the "don't do what I say, but do what I do" doctrine becomes an exercise in frustration.

Case in point, when painting rock formations, hilltops, mountain ridges, the beginners often copy the shapes without understanding the structure of the lines. It is not unusual for a range to look like a row of staples or horseshoes. I have sat in on classes where the instructor is unable to convey the concept of "contour" lines.

I am sure most of us have seen and understood what elevation lines represent. When we look at a topography map the elevation lines give us a description of the shape of the land. We know where the ridges and gullies are, and the relative steepness or flatness of the land. In painting a mountain range, we are just tilting the map on its side, so the elevation becomes not the height from the horizontal plane, but the distance to where we stand.

To illustrate my point, I've chiseled out a wooden block into the shape of

a mountain range. Now I have painted the " contour lines " on this block, and these lines describe the shape of the mountain ( as elevation lines describe the heights at different points on the map). When we paint these contour lines in succession, we are in effect transcribing the mountain range.

I have sliced through this block of wood into slabs to illustrate this point.  The more slabs I create, the more information I am able to draw ( i.e. more contour lines ), this is akin to having more "pixels", or watching a 1080p HD program vs. the 480 lines old programming.  The "chuen" lines that I have discussed  in the past i.e. hemp "chuen", is merely a sliver of such a slab; thus showing just a partial contour instead of the entire shape.  Therefore one can use a few strategic contour lines to describe the main shape of the range, and the "chuen" or "texture rubbing" lines to describe the minute details of the topography.

As we paint the lines with the Chinese brush, we are naturally in a "center tip" form as we traverse horizontally on paper, and as we turn the corner onto the vertical lines, the natural angle of inclination puts the brush in a "side-tip" mode automatically.  That part of the line describes "thickness" of the slab that we are painting, thus unknowingly giving a 3 dimensional appearance to what we have painted.

top photo is center tip( tip is aligned with direction of  travel

bottom picture is side-tip (tip is pointed at an angle to direction of travel)

Hopefully these little hints will help us attain a better understanding of Chinese landscape paintings.

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?