Happy New Year, Year of the Horse

Have a Happy, Safe and Prosperous New Year !

馬到功成 !
身體健康 !

Depiction of shape and form

I enjoy painting Canada geese.  It is their black neck with the white break just behind their eyes that catches my fascination initially.  I consider that particular feature, along with their knobby legs to be perfect models for practicing my calligraphic strokes.

Xie He was a Chinese critic in the 5th century who proposed the 6 doctrines, or canons , of Chinese painting.

He listed Vitality, possessing of energy as the top priority of the art form. This was followed by the mastering of brush strokes, calligraphic traits. The 3rd on the list was depiction of shape and form.  I had his words in mind when I started out to explore how to paint Canada geese.

I assert that these 3 doctrines are tightly intertwined.  I also believed that depiction of shape and form trumps the first two.  Only after one masters the depiction of form and shape can one transmit the confidence and savvy into lively brush strokes with conviction.  Obviously one has to master the foundation of brush strokes in order to proceed.

Allow me to share some of my sketch studies when I first embarked on painting Canada geese.

The black band at the front of the head reminds me of a parallelogram with a spout attached to the bottom.  The white band begins behind the eye and ends at where the neck would begin, with the lower edge forming the bottom of the head.

The neck itself is the expressive part.  This is where good practice of center tip brush stroke comes into play.  The curvature and attitude of the neck animates the story.

The body of the goose reminds me of the shape of rhombus or football (rugby).

Alternatively it could be a teardrop shape when viewed from above, or tail fin shape when the bird is floating on water;  just hark back to the Cadillacs of years gone by.

 

 

 

As far as the lower extremity is concerned, I would play up the knobby knee joint with the bow legged pigeon toes and I can parlez the feel of the goose waddling down the grassland.

By observing these birds feeding  and playing, one could successfully incorporate different neck attitudes with certain gaits and really bring your painting to life.  This is a proposition with a sanguine outcome.

Hopefully my observation and interpretation of the Canada goose will help any geese  enthusiasts with their painting projects.

Good painting to all.
.

Ole Oak Tree- Happy New Year 2014

Today is the first day of 2014.

 I am not a person to make new year's resolutions.  I know too well that I make them  just so I have something to disappoint myself with :).  I have been harboring this image of oak trees, and I have no explanation for it. 

Why oak trees?  Perhaps they provide a big and sturdy umbrella?  Perhaps they weather the winter well?  Perhaps they are there !

There is no better day than today to record that on paper.

Happy 2014.  I welcome thee.

Mounting problems

I have come across a really thin paper, known as the Cicada wing paper.  Very delicate, very translucent, very airy.  Paintings done on this paper have a different ambiance.  There is a loss of saturation with the ink and color, in exchange one gets an ethereal accounting of the brush strokes.  It is excellent with "mood" paintings.  It has a muted feel.

When it comes to mounting works done on this paper however, I was faced with all kinds of obstacles.  I was definitely in uncharted waters.

The paper tends to give up pigments and dyes if these are laid down too heavily.  This presents a grave problem in the customary wetting down the paper to relax the fibers before mounting.  To sidestep it I tried to apply starch to the mounting substrate instead and brush on the dry painting.  This alleviated the bleeding out problem ( for the most part ) but it was such a pain trying to brush out all the creases.  In fact I tore up a few practice pieces in the process.

After I finally got better at this, the final product was far from ideal.  Once the piece of "cicada wing" is fixed on a piece of substrate, it loses the very quality that gives it the tenuous feel.  I've experimented with different substrate thickness, but even the thinnest substrate I have is still too smug, breathless and stiff.  Imagine a beautiful lady donning elegant sheer lace, only to have the presentation destroyed by wearing something underneath the sheer garment.  You get the picture.

I experimented with not mounting the painting at all, but to just pin it down on foam board, and surround the work with a border of foam board.  On top of this border is the frame made with mat board.

 Basically I was playing with a float type presenting of the artwork.  The floating mat frame casted a delicate shadow and created a little breathing room such that the piece of cicada wing assumed a less restrained attitude.

This seemed like a workable solution to present works done on cicada wing paper.  In the meantime, I am looking forward to more experimenting in 2014!

Canada Geese Thank You Cards

I had an occasion to send out a couple of Thank You cards and I thought a couple of hand painted ones would be appropriate for this occasion.

Since I seem to be partial to Canada Geese, I decided to use them as my subjects.

These images were painted with ink and coffee on matted photo paper.

 

 

 

It's Kinda Private

It has been an introspective period.

I went and paid my last respect to a dear friend.  His family requested a painting from me to be carved onto his headstone and that had just been completed.

I was then invited to attend a party for the developmentally challenged.

There was a Blues band playing for the banquet and this young lady with Down Syndrome climbed onto the stage uninvited.  Normally this would have been a social disaster, but perhaps because of the company that we were in, nobody bothered.  Except for two people.

The young lady was enthusiastically swaying to the music, keeping time to the snares, having a jolly good time.

And the mom was busy capturing the daughter's every animation with her cell phone,  exuding utter joy from her face.

I couldn't help but think about the pure innocence and elation exhibited by the child, and the unqualified pride and amazement felt by the parent.  That was a private moment, even though the venue was a very public one.  Such was the dichotomy.  We could only guess, perhaps, what was going through the minds of these two individuals.

Kinda like viewing (or reading ) our paintings.  There is no mass hysteria, it is not a rock concert.  There is no protocol to like them, or to dislike them, it is not science.  We can talk till we are blue in the face about techniques, theories and what not but it all boils down to the private  conversation we have with our audience.  Our paintings are our ways of letting people take a stealthy  glimpse of ourselves.

Nothing else matters.  It's like taking  a stroll on a beach.  I'm awash in my own thoughts.

The thoughts are all mine, and they are kinda private.  I'll confide sometimes, somehow, to someone.

Arpeggios In Brush Strokes

Chinese calligraphy is sometimes recognized as the highest visual art form in Chinese art.  It is the foundation governing the use of the Chinese brush.  I have been told that a good calligrapher can evolve to be a good painter with relative ease, but a person naive to calligraphy could never be a good painter. 

I practise calligraphy not only to hone my skills with the brush, but because this was something ingrained into my upbringing long time ago.  Calligraphy was taught as part of the curriculum, even at the primary school level.  I now regret that I did not pay close attention to it during my formative years.  I blame this on the absence of inspiring teachers.

My current calligraphy teacher wanted me to do the grass script calligraphy. My teacher proposed a therapeutic goal of opening me up and allowing me to be more open and expressive.  I have read books on handwriting analysis; on how personality can be revealed by the manner a person crosses the T's and dots the I's.  This is a novel  idea to employ calligraphy as a tool to modify personality.

Instinct told me that the grass script  is the hurried style, when the person was writing in a hurry and the strokes were simplified and also became connected between characters.  This impression was supported by the amount of voids or empty streaks in the brush stroke, hinting fast brush speed on the paper, and the thin silk like brush strokes, again hinting speed and haste.  This style is carefree and elegant to me, all at the same time.

I tried writing them fast and furious.  I tried to write them standing up in my kung fu stands and using my hips and shoulders to effect change of directions.  I tried using dry brush so it was easier to lay down streaks.  I tried using a very stiff, almost wire brush like tufted brush to achieve better transmittal of strength from my body onto the paper.  I tried to gyrate and tilt my brush laterally to an acute angle, to obtain the sharp edge so I can demonstrate the fine corn silk like threads.

Boy was I wrong.  I have never been so far from the truth. I was so misguided  in my assessment that it wasn't even funny, especially to my calligraphy teacher.

Despite the  appearance of hasty cursive, I still needed to start slow and steady.  The form and energy lied within the proper execution of the brushstrokes and not merely the apparent shape.  The empty streaks were happy accidents and not from purposed manufacturing.  The thin threads were from natural lifting and the desire of the mind to go to the next character.  Thus my kung fun stands and using wire brush and tilting the brush amounts to a cartoonish  tracing and not "writing".  I was engaged in theatrics.  I was being superficial and ostentatious.

And this is so true.  More often than not, we were so consumed by gingerly trying to form the perfect image that we either forgot or were unable to comprehend what is important at hand.  We forgot what we must do to get there.  When we look at the photography of a prancing antelope we saw the grace and agility, but we forgot that was just one moment captured by the shutter. There was the running, the  recoiling of the legs, the arching of the back, the extension of the body and neck.  Everything happened in a fluid continuum and not as discrete micro movements.  Despite the best craftsman, mannequins are just that; and the figures in the best wax museum are only life-like, but do not exude life.  I was trying so hard to imitate each brushstroke, each character, that I lost sight of the flow and the narration of the script.  I was trying to create a quantum leap of a prancing anetlope from one that stood still.

So my calligraphy teacher demonstrated by writing just 2 characters.  They looked nothing like the original Te.  There were no thin threads, no streaking brush strokes.  Yet there was the palpable grace and energy which conformed with the grass style script.

After the benevolent brow-beating, I learned to look at the grass style writing in new light.  I settled down and concentrated not so much on the shapes and nuances but on the brush strokes themselves.
It became apparent that even the strokes seemed hurried, they still needed to be extended fully before changing directions.  It was analogous to snapping a wet towel or cracking a whip.  The tip needed to travel all the way  until it was fully extended before snapping back, thus getting that extra leverage to deliver that sting.

I also became more lucid about the delivery of the brush strokes.  I gave myself permission to be free from copying every single brush stroke, but to feel the whole string of characters.  Pretty soon a natural rhythm was starting to take shape.  Some characters felt better if the continuation is through several change of directions, while others  could be just one stroke. There is a cadence to this dancing of the brush.   I call this the arpeggios in brush strokes.  It is true that the arpeggio consists of progression of notes, but we play them as a fluid string rather than segmented stops.  And then when we get good enough, we can impart color and character to individual notes even in a legato.  In fact calligraphy is not unlike bowing.  There is the frog, the tip, up bow and down bow, much like  the belly, the tip and brush travel in various directions.  There are musical passages requiring successive down bows or up bows, or expressive frog to tip, or several bows to make one seamless note.  The pressure, speed and placement of the bow has to come from within, and not manufactured from a set of instructions.

There is hope for me. Yet.