Finding My Roots, Chapter Three

I wanted to leave the lower left corner devoid of details, to contrast with the upper right corner of intricate arrangements of roots.  Call me fastidious but somehow I always bear in mind the importance of contrast in my painting, the ying and the yang, and in Chinese terms, the host and the guest.  Perhaps this is even more critical in a painting like this, where the entire paper surface seemed to be occupied by the same monotonous subject matter.  Soon I deemed that corner to be too meager, so I turned to my leaves and gravels.

Judicious application of shadows around the edges gave them a three dimensional feel, lifting them off the ground.  The shadow of the top leaf gave the illusion that it was folding onto itself.

I happened to notice that when viewed from a very shallow angle, the surface of the paper is buckled with lots of tiny undulations, as a result of all the brushstrokes.  That explains why the ink wash sometimes found interesting routes on its own.  By capitalizing this phenomenon I was able to form more natural margins on my roots.  At the very least, I could use that as a guide to apply my shadows.  This is an advantage this semi-sized Xuan offered.

There were lots of places where roots branched out like a cross, and shading was done by sitting the belly of my brush at these axillary points.  This is analogous to running a round file at the inside corner of crossbars to get a nice chamfer edge.

My finished work:

I particularly like the upper right quadrant of the painting.  It narrated very nicely the relationship of  the mangled roots; which ones were on top, which ones were on the bottom.  I could almost trace each root as they emerged from the main branch and then fused with others or submerged into the soil.  This is what we Chinese meant when we choose to say "to read a painting" over "to view a painting".  By reading a painting, one is not turning over pages, but all the elements and nuances with our mind.

Finding My Roots, Chapter Two

I've been devoting much of my time working on the banyan tree root painting.  As I said, I was vacillating between  the blotchy one and the more line drawn one.  I tried to do both of them simultaneously but found myself shunning the more complicated line drawn version.  I still think this version is devoid of emotion and it looks sterile.

I thought I've reached a good stopping place for the blotchy one, as I've shown on my last blog.  There was no more excuse not to spend more time on the line drawn one.

The presence of the gravel granules helped to untangle the messy roots in the last painting and I would like to continue to pursue that effect.  Why not leaves too?  It's just as likely to find them by the roots on the ground.

Thus I sketched in a couple of them; sort of reserving a spot.  I would work them into the overall ink tone as I get there.

Here's an example of a few leaves that have found their places,

I was allowing my brush to guide me, going with the flow.  I suppose this must have been very close to jamming with a group of musicians, improvising my cadenza.

Then I noticed the few rootlets in the dark depression seemed to end abruptly.  Since I was in the vicinity, I adjusted the ink gradient a bit such that they appear to fade into the ground. I am referring to the area at the tip of the black V,

So this is what I have to show for a couple of days of honest work,

Finding My Roots

As I was continuing my attempt in painting the Banyan tree roots, I was reminded of  the reason why.

The above photo is a pretty good representation of the sort of imagery that motivated me.

I don't know how many of us can recall unraveling a ball of yarn.  I certainly do.  Helping my mom when I was much younger as she knitted cardigans for my brothers and I.  For that matter, how about unraveling fishing lines or extension cords.  The task seemed daunting to begin with, but as we grabbed a hold of some loose strands we began to make heads and tails out of them.  All the time we were wondering if we picked the right strands to follow.

I believe it was Voltaire who said " uncertainty is uncomfortable, but certainty is absurd".  It is the lure of success that keeps our forward motion.  I find it exhilarating to tackle something with just a tad of difficulty, such that I won't be demoralized, yet the promise of success is so rewarding.

Obviously in the case of painting a jumbled bunch of roots, failure is inconsequential, just time lost and energy wasted.

The overriding issue in this particular attempt was accountability.  How do I account for these roots; their origins and their destinations.

At first I was obsessed by being able to trace each root and its branches.  It took me a while to realize that perhaps I was more worried about the inability of the viewers to trace the roots.  Did I give off the impression that I was just wantonly throwing a bunch of lines together and called them roots?  The truth of the matter was, many had questioned me.

Once I realized my own insecurity, I thought of our circulatory system.   We can see the major arteries and veins, but not the microscopic capillaries.  Yet each cell in our body depends on these vessels to deliver oxygen and nutrients and carry away waste.  Thus if my roots do not seem to be connected, they actually are.  Accurate mapping is not a necessity.

Once I understood this concept, I was at peace with myself and thought of ways to narrate my roots better.
Some of them could be below surface and re-emerge someplace else.  This would totally take care of the accountability issue.

So I started to paint dirt and gravel, suggesting a ground.

Since I had painted everything so dark, I had to use white color to introduce the granules of gravel.
I actually used latex paint, as an experiment.  I thought the latex paint would give me thickness and texture.

Then I painted in the left margins of these white specks with ink, to give the illusion of light coming from the right.

I did that to accentuate the three dimensional effect and to give more realism to the gravel and sand granules.

I picked out a few main roots and applied stronger shadows to them, at the same time making the left half of the painting darker, adding a little drama to the work,

I think this is a good place to stop, allowing myself time to re-evaluate.

I shall call this painting Finding My Roots.

Literally and figuratively.

We think we know where we came from; our heritage, lineage, pedigree.

But do we?

We are all interconnected.

Bit off more than I could chew

Winter is here.

Trees are shedding their leaves.

For more reason I love a naked tree more than one with full foliage.  I think I enjoy the intricacy and the stubbornness of the branches.

I've attempted branches before, so why don't I try roots.

Banyan tree roots to be exact.  Full, intertwined, entangled; yet each branch leads to something, somewhere.
Like capillaries in our body.

I sensed this is a daunting task.  How to make sense of a senseless mess.  Yet my OCD beckoned.  How else could I enjoy the obsession of  repetitive work without regret!

I wanted to paint this in black and white.  I've grown really fond of this setup.  It appealed to me at a visceral level, one that I could not verbalize.

It didn't take me long to realize that I was in deep trouble.  I was losing sight of what I was painting, or for that matter, what image was in my head.

I started out by thinking that I would paint the roots as negative spaces against a dark, sumptuous background.  That took too much planning.  It wasn't natural.  So I abandoned.

Then I tried to paint the roots using a light ink, filling in the non-roots areas later with  darker ink.  My lack of patience got the better of me.  I simply could not wait for the visual effect to materialize.  I had problem envisioning the painting.  I wanted to throw my brush against the wall.

So I resorted to my tried and true method of sketching.  I took time sketching out the roots using charcoal; developing each lead.  I then developed the painting by addressing which area should be filled in or not.  It wasn't as easy as I had planned because I was soon immersed in this jungle of lines.

On top of that, the painting looked more like an illustration than a painting.  There was something amiss about it.

So I went back to my other method.  I just dived into a new sheet of Xuan and started to paint.  Again I was confused about my positive and negative spaces.... which I subsequently said "the hell with it".  Once I decided that I didn't care, and perhaps aided by the recent attempt of sketching with charcoal, I seemed to be able to fuse the positive and negative spaces together and make some sense of the composition.

 I forged on until I had all the spaces accounted for.  Often times the positive space tuned into negative space and vice versa.  I did it without much thought; I just went along.

This is how the draft looked like after the ink has dried.

My next move is to work on the details with regards to my ink values.  I am still vacillating between my charcoal sketched  version and the purely brush version.  I promise myself to be patient.  I shall wait for another day.

Obviously I've bitten off more than I could chew.

Shi Tao Revisited

I mentioned that I was not pleased with my rendition of the flat tops in my emulation.  I sensed there was something wrong and I was disappointed at myself that I just brushed over it (pun intended).  What was the haste?

The reason my flat tops looked awkward was because I ignored the minute breaks in the lines.  I had dealt with this subject matter in my blog More Than Just Broken Lines dated 3/29/2012.  In that blog, I surmised that the breaks in a line are often used to create distance, depth.  When these gaps are strategically placed,  an illusion of 3-dimensional thickness is created.

When I painted the flat tops, I painted the parameter line as a continuous, non-broken line.  Thus it was boring and two dimensional, despite the presence of vertical ch'uen lines denoting a folding feature in the land mass, i.e. a raised ridge or slope of sorts.  I magnified the original print of Shi Tao's landscape and was delighted about my observation.

In the above cut-out, one could see a break in the line at where the fold could occur.

Here I have an example of another ancient Chinese brush painter whose name escaped me, but his technique of using the gap was even more astute and deliberate.

While examining Shi Tao's painting I also noticed evidence of light markings underneath the darker ink.  He sketched his paintings.  The practise of sketching had at times become a contentious issue with me, at least during my encounter with various teachers.  Some of my teachers are staunch objectors to sketching; they deem that a sign of incompetence.  Whereas I had teachers who advocated sketching, regardless of whether one was doing brush work or not, especially in laying out a landscape painting.

Armed with this knowledge, I made another attempt in Shi Tao's landscape painting.  This time I sketched it out in charcoal first.

After the sketching is done, I went over the charcoal lines with my brush work.  I must say this allowed me to control my brush tip much better.  I could devote more attention to the quality of the lines, since I didn't have to be too concerned about placement of shapes.

In my once over with light ink brush work, I was paying special attention to the breaks in the lines when I got to painting the flat tops.

As usual I filled in my ch'uen lines and shading whenever the brush was in the right condition to do so.

This was followed by my blues.  After that I took a day off, which I shouldn't have done.

The reason I regretted taking the day off was because I had allowed the blue to totally dry, thus it would not bleed into the browns, forming hard, artificial boundaries between the different colors.  I found the lack of transition unpleasant to look at.  I should have known better!  Is this what people refer to as wet on wet technique?

I paid better attention to the round leaves too by using better brushstrokes and using side-tip strokes on one side to denote thickness/shadow, allowing a more 3-dimensional appearance.

With the mixed foliage, I tried to paint in the under layers with light ink first to give an impression of a fuller tree.

A wash with brush cleaning bath was applied to blend the colors.

After the final wash is dried

The first and second attempts side by side

The two works have a different color cast, mainly due to the different time of the day when the photo was taken. The one on the right is the second attempt.  It shows better articulation of the flat tops, as it should be; that was my motivation for this second edition.    It turned out that there is an additional flat top on the right that I didn't catch during the first attempt, and the little water level drop  right next to the red round leaves that I omitted is now added back in.  Obviously more ch'uen lines, albeit in disarray they seem.   I need to hone my skills in having a rich field of lines without making them look  like a wad of jumbled  noodles.  I also do not like the blotchy look of the colors; a consequence of my not mixing the colors in a timely manner.  I suppose it wouldn't be fun if it was easy!

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.