Emulating Shi Tao

Shi Tao (1642 -1707) was a Chinese landscape painter.  His paintings were a little out of character with the times.  His works showed a hint of impressionism, with bold splash ink and absurd looking mountains; as if the mountains were bowing.  I don't know if that had anything to do with the fact that he was a monk, but I find his works most pleasing, even in today's light.

His landscape painting would embody all the traditional thematic matters and techniques and yet he was able to jazz it up to be almost irrelevant.  I found such an example thumbing through a collection of his calligraphy and paintings and decided to study that painting by trying to emulate it.

The basic technique is simple enough; hemp fibre ch'uen was used extensively to describe the rocky formations.

The Chinese brush stroke is so simple and yet pragmatic in describing rocky topography.  Center-tip brush gives one the contour line.  Side-tip brush describes the thickness of that slice of landmass, rendering a 3-dimensional account.

I started off by laying down all the contour lines with light ink, and plotted in some of the shading when the dampness of the brush felt appropriate.

The canon of depth perspective requires the artist to describe incidentals from near to far, thus the buildings behind the first landmass, and a road formed by a long flat ridge directs our attention to the distance.

Shi Tao also used the traditional method to describe a mixed foliage.  In this painting one could clearly see the different brushstrokes used to denote different types of plants.

The negative space seemingly represents clouds, but is also a clever way of creating a separation between landmasses, thus giving depth and perspective.

The painting included several flat top structures to the left of the road.  These flat tops are quite common in classical Chinese landscape.  I remember doing tons of homework learning how to write the flat tops. Unfortunately I've taken this exercise for granted and I can see a lot of problems with my current rendition.  Perhaps I'll have to refresh my memory.

Blue is splashed on to mark the shaded areas.  The distant mountain tops are painted in blue also.  This incidentally agrees with the western method of depicting far away landscape, when earth's atmosphere renders everything blue.  I always remembered being told to use warm colors for close in objects and cold tones for distant objects.  I find it very interesting that a Chinese painter in the late Ming dynasty observed the same principles.

I now use the tea color pigment to fill in the rest of the landscape.

The entire painting is now washed by my brush cleaning bath.  This liquid is the culmination of all the colors that I have used, thus is ideal in establishing an equalizing tone for the entire painting.

My finished painting, an emulation of Shi Tao's work.  As alluded to earlier, I might re-do it to see if I could improve on some of the brushstrokes, especially with regards to the flat tops.

Rebirth of Multnomah Falls

One of the places I visited while travelling this summer was Multnomah Falls.  This is an attraction I frequented several times a year so I know it pretty well; so I thought.  I was functioning like a tour guide for my visitors, and as I was verbalizing  my observations, I realized what I did wrong with a painting I did years ago.

I retrieved the painting from my attic and worked on a plan of attack.  I wanted to correct my mistakes.

Here's the original painting

The most obtrusive offense to me was the gaping void left on top of the water fall.  I must had been so enthralled about the water that I thought it could just appear out of the thin air.

There also seemed to be a strong representation of parallel lines in the painting; the trees on the left, the water falls, and the two really obvious trees on the right.  I also did not enjoy the weird tree on the upper right, despite it could have actually looked like it.

I remember when I was putting together this painting, I was trying to incorporate the traditional method of painting mixed foliage, as exemplified by the Mustard Seed  Garden.  The fact remains that the painting looked very staged; as if I just threw a bunch of things haphazardly together and called that done.  I know the artist has certain leeway in fabrication, especially when this is not en plein air; but the fact remains that the sum has to be greater than the parts.

First on my agenda was to paint in the grey sky and plug up the space above the upper fall.  What I had initially painted suggested a separation of the cliff into two halves, bisected by the fall, which is not feasible. I failed to recognize that the cliff was a land mass, on which a river flows and the river cascaded down the cliff face as a waterfall.  I needed the trees in the background to account for the land beyond the line of sight.

I then worked on the cliff face by making it darker, to better contrast with the waterfall.  I used a chuen brushstroke that helped to impart texture, making the rock face more pronounced.

I also added leaves to the weird tree on the upper right. I used a kidney shaped dot brushstroke, just to add variety.

I then proceeded to darken to two parallel tree trunks on the right, and shortened one of the exposed member.  What made the original setup more obnoxious was that the parallel lines were of equal length.
The resulting trees looked a lot more pleasing.

.I really liked the void left just north of the twin trees now.  That little bit of space created a distance, separating the background from the middle and the front.  We now have depth perspective.

I thought the original painting lacked punch; missing a hook.

It happened that my visit was at a time when leaves were about to don their autumn colors.
I also remembered a picture I took last year of fall colors,

so I shall borrow from this scene.

I tried to do the leaves in a cross hatch fashion to give them more texture.  I did this by laying down my brush, employing the full length of the tip and belly of the nib.

The effect was too strong and looked fake; reminded me of a bad case of artificial sharpening on the photoshop.  So I eventually sanded it down to acquire that mottled look.

I gave the lower half of the painting an orange red wash, to impart a warm cast to the foreground.  I thought that helped to delineate the front, the middle and the back.

Now the painting still encompasses the various types of leaves to describe mixed foliage in the traditional brush.  One can  find round dots, kidney dots, straight hash, pine needle, willow, maple, bamboo and  rhododendron leaves represented in the mix, but the varieties are able to coexist in better harmony than before.

Be A Gracious Guest; Bide Your Time.

I submitted several of my works for a juried art event.

I wanted to test the waters by seeing how my Suliao Xuan Ban technique would be perceived; and received.

The works I selected were:

Oblivious

Pillars

Midnight

Journey

Going Home

Dream

Aside from presenting in the Suliao Xuan Ban format, all these paintings were done in a monochromatic fashion, where I used ink or tea and coffee to effect the gray scale studies.

Before I was even notified of the jury results, I was doubtful that my two pieces that showed faces would be accepted.   I based my forecast on the fact that I've never studied human or portrait drawings and I'm sure that genre has its own rules of determining workmanship; and my demerits would be plenty. 

I did not disappoint myself.  Both Oblivious and Dream were rejected.   Despite the fact that I predicted the results, I still felt dejected.  Rejected would be more accurate.  

I had a chance to speak to the curator of the show and was told ( referring to Oblivious ) "the painting is strong, but the faces are not familiar to the West"

How dare you, was my knee jerk reaction.  That comment was almost racist!  To reject my works because of  poor artistry is one thing, but to shun them because the faces are unfamiliar to the west is asinine.  Our local art scene is still catering to what is familiar to the West?  How could this be happening  in today's world?   Am I being naive? What about Picasso's cubism?  How familiar are his faces?  

I calmed down after fuming for a couple of weeks and became philosophical; sort of.  I realized that I am a guest in this country and culture; regardless of whether I am a citizen of this great nation or not.  I need to know my place, and know that I am at my host's discretion.

What brought this understanding was my recent visit to a Historic Site.

A tiny stone building in a Central Oregon town called John Day is now on the Register of National Historic Places.  This humble building is the Kam Wah Chung museum.

It was a complete surprise to me that out in the middle of nowhere, in this desolate part of Oregon, in the Canyon City, John Day area, there once was a population of close to 2,000 Chinese.  This was the late 1800's.

The two occupants of this building were Doc Hay, a traditional Chinese herbalist and his partner Lung On, one who spoke English and was savvy in business practices.  The recorded history would tell us that Doc Hay was a well respected healer because of his knowledge of  herbal medicine and his kind heart and generosity towards the sick, even to people outside of the Chinese community.  His position in and outside of the community was revered, despite several attempts from the medical community to paint him as a quack and to bar him from treating people.  Lung On on the other hand dressed in Western garb and knew the customs and in fact owned the first automobile dealership in John Day.

So the program presented by the Oregon State Parks system would have us believe that these two gentlemen were upright citizens in good standing and were sort of a folk hero at the time, in spite of  their ethnicity  This is a far cry from the "sundown law" that was in existence throughout much of Oregon.  I visited the underground world of Chinese immigrants in Pendleton ( Eastern Oregon) and was told that Chinese had to go to their underground tunnels and chambers after sundown or face even greater peril.  A lot of the Chinese immigrants in the early days were miners, lured in by the nascent gold and silver mines.  Subsequently the Chinese were brought in by the Central Pacific railroad when a large labor force was needed to expand the rails to the Pacific coast.

The last occupant of that tiny stone building died in 1952 and both Doc Hay and Lung On were buried in John Day. Their wish was to deed the building and all the contents to the City of John Day.  

It wasn't until 1967 when the city of John Day was about to demolish the building and through a search of the Title realized that the building actually belonged to the city.  For 15 years the building was locked up and deserted and forgotten.  A building that was generously given to the citizens of John Day by their own celebrities was left unattended.  Such was the account from the State Parks department.

I came to realize that despite the fact that these two people were Chinese pioneers, and well liked folk heroes in the community, they were still two unknowns; two errant ships lost in the sea of an alien culture. Their contributions to the community meant nothing to the city government, at least during their lifetime.  Their generosity to the city they called home, their well gestures were all but forgotten, taken for granted.  After all, they were from a different place, a different people; victims of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was enacted in 1882 by President Arthur.  What Doc Hay and Lung On thought was their dedication to the community, to the city, to their host country, were all but just entries in the Tax Deeds Department, locked up in the city vault.   It was not a scenario where the city was strapped for funds to do anything with the structure.  It was clearly a case of not appreciating the ownership of the bequest.  

Not until the time when it was deemed appropriate, or opportunistic, to document  the Chinese presence and make  the site a Historic landmark, perhaps to promote tourism, did their story take on a different fate.

Who knows, nobody in the city government of John Day cared about these two legends back in 1952, and somehow someone recognized the opportunity to tell their stories in 1967 and seized upon it.   The timing has to be right, and that requires the precise convergence of 3 elements;  time, place and people.  Call that fate, as nothing will happen sans any of the 3 requirements.

The Parks Department found over 30 thousand dollars worth of un-deposited checks  in a trunk beneath a bed.   Some of these checks were from places outside of Oregon, perhaps from people who sought Doc Hay's services. He had a mail order business at the time.  There was speculation that Doc Hay was not well versed in money and did not know to cash the checks.  I found that not plausible. His partner opened up the first car dealership in town, for heaven's sake.

I came away feeling bitter sweet.  I was able to peep into the lives of early Chinese immigrants, at least the version that was told today.  I felt proud of their accomplishments, and empathized with the fact that they lived in the shadow of their hosts' good graces, or sometimes the woes of their hosts' nefarious deeds, as evidenced by the bullet holes in the wooden door to the building.  They even installed the water well and hand pump inside the enclosure of the building for safety reasons, so I was told.  One thing that legislators could not legislate is attitude.

Be gracious; good guests know their places.

What Is In A Title, Oblivious, Faces Of Silence!

I've alluded to whether a painting needs a title or not in my past posts.  I belong to the camp that says yes it does.

Recently my own personal experience brings home the need for a title.

My portrayal of three faces naturally brought up the question of what this painting was about.

"You were practicing painting a face."

"Empathy"

"Meditation"  

Meditation was by far the most popular nomination.

Then I said, " Have eyes, but Won't  see"

I must admit, my painting was inspired by the verses in The Sound of Silence,

    "people talking without speaking

                people hearing without listening

                         people writing songs that voices never share

                                    and no one dare, disturb the sound of silence"

The face on the right, Arhat, was supposed to have attained the perfect life, free from pain and suffering.  Arhat is believed to have attained nirvana; analogous to a saint in the western religion,  and yet he was represented in reverse values.  Everything about him was just the contrary.  Black became white and white became black.  Despite all that we perceived  him as nothing wrong  in this painting; despite the unspoken uneasiness due to the reversed values.

He did have his eyes closed, or did he?  Oh but wait, he had no eyeballs.  Was he not seeing or just not feeling.  Did I forget to paint in the eyeballs?

So I went from a somber, heavy rendition of a real face on the left, to a negative, fictitious face on the right, and inserted a benevolent Buddha face in the middle for good measure, all with their eyes closed, or half closed.  Everybody knows Buddha is benevolent and caring and a lot of people in this world look to Buddha for comfort and guidance and blessings.

"The Have Eyes But Won't See is too strong and spiteful a statement", commented one person.

"You need to tone it down" was the suggestion.

Like the song said, we can talk without speaking, hear without listening and I included looking without actually seeing.  I am referring to things in general, our living environment, the way we do things, our society, our world.

Could this be denial?  Denial is a perfect coping mechanism and we all do that to some extent to protect ourselves.

So were these faces pretending that they don't or can't see because their eyes were conveniently closed or missing?  I used the negative Arhat face to say there's more to that.  This Arhat was not what he was cracked up to be. 

This painting is not about meditation or empathy.

Donald Rumsfeld ( US Secretary of Defense ) had said that there are "known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns".  That seemed like a conundrum but if one analyzes that closely, it makes perfect sense. (I hope I'm not misquoting here)

There are times ( and people who) when we lack the knowledge that we actually are ignorant.  There is a medical condition called anosognosia when a person is truly unaware of one's own defect.

I am going to bastardize this term to include everyday circumstances when the persons involved are truly ignorant of the facts, and doing so without malice.

I was involved in some discussion of whether the Xuan I paint on is archival or not.  To the western practitioner who paints on paper, perhaps that is of utmost importance, being archival grade and acid free and what not.  For someone who paints on Xuan this question never arose.  Paintings done on Xuan and silk and mounted on paper or silk  from centuries ago survived just fine. We have always taken that for granted.  Yet both sides argue and insist.

The west insists that paper be archival and the east insists that mounting not only be done, but done in the traditional fashion.  My way of mounting on canvas, cement board or plastic catches nothing but ire. Perhaps these new substrates are unknown territories, their compatibility and longevity have not been proven.  One thing both sides agreed on was dry mounting is bad.  Has the traditional wet mounting of Xuan fallen victim to modern day technology?  Or is the old way of doing things too time consuming and is out of sync with the I Want It Now mentality?  Or could this be that nobody wants to invest the time into learning how to wet mount anymore?

People used to think the earth was flat and we were the center of the universe.  We insist and fight based on preconceptions, prejudices, customs, cultures and religion.  Assumptions that are not well vetted, or simply beyond our comprehension.

So are these insistence anosognosic or are they just ignorant demands.  Are we so afraid to step out of the box and give things a try?  Food for thought.

Sorry about the segue but I really needed to get that off my chest.  

In the end I am going to title my piece "Oblivious".  Arhat, Buddha, all the Salvation in the world is not going to deliver us from human slaughtering each other, from natural disasters.   People engaging in wars pray to their gods for a successful mission.  Both sides do that, I am sure.  If the deity was merciful and all knowing, why would any favoritism be bestowed.  Are our lives worth more than the enemies?  After all we are all His children.  After a disaster people have a moment of silence and pray for the victims.  So where is the Creator now?  Why would such calamity be allowed to happen to his flock in the first place.  I have no doubt for that brief moment, in the prayer,  most of us feel connected to the Spirit and that we empathized and we gave off sincere, kind thoughts.   Humanity, we're supposed to be human beings.  Homo sapiens, we are supposed to have feelings and a conscience.

If we can assume there is life after death and reincarnation and all that, then is the purported utopia a known unknown, and if we have no expectations or beliefs, then is that an unknown unknown?  If we are emphatic about our death is the final curtain then that must be a known known. What makes a person think and wish that our existence should be forever?  That goes far beyond the survival instinct bred into our DNA.  Do we exercise good deeds just for the sake of karma?  If there was no law, no watch dogs, no god, would we have behaved the same?

In either case, we all have eyes and most of us have sight but how many of us really see with them.   We might as well be blind or have no eyeballs.  We are blinded by pride.  We are blinded by ideology. We are blinded by ignorance.  We are blinded by convenience.

I am guilty as charged. 

Oblivious.  That's the only answer I could offer.  These are faces of silence.

Destruction, Reconstruction

I painted this version of Beaverton Creek in a more traditional manner, trying to incorporate classical techniques of showing mixed flora and landscape.

It is now looking more awkward to me everyday.  Perhaps it is my color scheme; too vibrant.

The tree at the bottom is too ostentatious.  I remembered intentionally picking that color, sort of like a punctuation mark.  Perhaps it was mod when I did that, but now it looked really out of place.  Like going out dressed in a Victorian outfit.

Perhaps I was too busy sorting out the different techniques and I forgot about the cohesiveness of the painting as a whole.

I've been itching to do something about it.

Once a painting on Xuan is mounted, in this case on canvas, there's virtually no way to make any corrections. Then the idea came to me that I must be willing to sustain some casualties for any corrections to happen.  The question is how much am I willing to gamble or sacrafice.

Go for broke, I finally decided.  It would be a fun exercise and experience for me.

My weapon was sanding paper.  Yes sanding paper.

I decided that I needed to destroy some of the things I had built into this painting before the phoenix could arise from the ashes.

Gingerly I sanded away with my 100 grit paper.  The image was getting lighter, ever so slightly.  The lines were becoming less well defined and the painting assumed a more relaxed attitude.

OOps, I sanded too harshly.  There was a hole.

Pull back, breathe easy.  Easy does it.

I stopped before I totally mutilated my painting.  I mixed a dilute paste of gesso and ink and scraped that on with a putty knife.  

I started to re-paint on the dried gesso, changing color, shape and what not.  Everything was fair game.  I held no prisoners.

After the repainting had dried, I proceeded to sanding again.

As I discovered, the process of sanding and re-gesso and re-painting actually formed intricate overlapping layers of paint and gesso and the combined effect was almost like something done with air brush and displayed depth that wasnt there before.

I love this amalgamation process.

The lines and brushstrokes dissolved into mere suggestions with easy transition from one area to the other.

Notice the hole I created from sanding too vigorously.

The heavy lines of the bridge was sanded off and now wore a weathered look.

I retained the clear lines and saturation at the lower left corner

The right side of the bridge was obscured further by repeated sanding and re-staining

The patch where the lookout was located became just a suggestion, with mottled rails

In this rebuilding process I changed the perception of the water by introducing haze.  It could be mist, it could be the reflection of the sky.  I changed the color and shape of the foliage at the bottom.  I lightened the bridge quite a bit and concealed the ends more fully such that the structure is less harsh.  I also retained the clear brushstrokes at the lower left corner for contrast with the rest of the painting.  I expanded the color field around the trees, i.e. the barren tree in the middle had a color cast way beyond its branches. The entire left half of the painting had clusters of yellow hues.  I found myself drawn in by the scent of these baits and wanted to explore more.  The painting might look hazy but as one looked through the fog, there was still a lot of detail for the audience to travel through.  That satisfies the depth perception, in the Chinese painting canon anyways.

The painting looks western, and yet the way the mixed foliage is portrayed is classical Chinese brush, choice of color notwithstanding.

This painting now reminds me of a place that is dreary and misty and grey.   A place I call home.  A place where the disease called SAD exists.  The acronym stands for Seasonal Affect Disorder.  That's when a person suffers from mood disorder because of insufficient exposure to daylight.  The remedy is phototherapy, where artificial light is used to fill in the gap. 

I think the transformation was quite dramatic.

Face, Second Phase, Third Phase

For my second face on that huge piece of paper, I wanted to expand on the theme of eyes closed.

No, not eyes wide shut as in that steamy movie, but something more cerebral.

For some reason, Buddhism came into mind.  I wanted to paint the attainment of Arhat.  Such state encompasses ridding of all thoughts, worries,pain, matters of life and death, and removed from all worldly  burdens.

For this face, I chose to do something a little different.  I wanted to paint it with reversed values.  I needed it to resemble a photo film negative.

I began by sketching the basic construct with very light ink.

I then worked on building up the values, black is white, white is black

Finally all the values are in

The original sketch showed slits for the eyes, where eyeballs would reside.  In this negative rendition, I intentionally left out the eyeballs.

The interesting thing is, to me anyways, that after I looked at the picture for a while, my brain seemed to work overtime and started to fill in the blanks and the image no longer resembled a film negative anymore.  It started a life of its own.  The fact that it had no eyeballs was not relevant anymore, nor was it evident. In fact it seemed like Arhat had his eyes closed also.  The eyeballs were just surreptitiously missing.

I did the face in this fashion because I had a statement to make, which I will delve into more deeply in the future.  The gist was I wanted the negative image to be a contrast with the rest of the faces.  I imagined that the audience would  sense the disharmony  but they probably couldn't tell right away.  In fact I was hoping this divergence would create a certain level of discomfort or apprehension but one was not able to attribute to the source.

For the third face I chose a figure from the Buddhist theme again

here is the painting with all the faces

At this point I really am not sure what my next step should be.  My intention is to call this quits; before I do something stupid.

Saving Face

I was having fun painting the face of the Dream State piece.

Make hay while the sun shines, strike it while it's hot....... enough of dorky cliches!

I decided to do more faces.

Well, that's one face.  It's a start.

My intention is to paint a few faces on this piece of Xuan, perhaps carrying the same mood or theme.   I'll let that thought brew for a while.