Young Talents

I've been offered another opportunity to share the joy of painting a rooster with a young audience, as part of the Chinese New Year celebratory program.  I felt that I had developed a fluency with my method and since I already had the necessary material, then why not?

I managed to capture some of the paintings for sharing:

A heartwarming experience indeed !

And, no, I didn't find any dragon-moms!

Rooster Painting at Cultural Fair

I showed how to paint a rooster in my last blog, and I am happy to report that the scheme worked!

This is what the venue looked like

Here are a few of the examples of the day's work

I honestly don't know who's more happy, me or the participants.

Demonstrating Rooster Painting

My rooster painting caught the attention of a few organizations and they have asked me to do some demo sessions for them, as part of the Chinese New Year celebration.

One of the organization is putting up a Cultural Fair and I was invited to man a booth to show people how to paint a rooster.

I entertained the original proposal of painting a rooster for the visitors as they drop by my booth and rejected that idea rather quickly.   I didn't want to be a face-painting-ish event for me.   Not that I have anything against people who do face paintings, but I had the vision of being a tutor who will show people how to paint a rooster.  I envisioned that visitors would have some hands on experience and paint their own roosters, and get to keep them as their own painting.  I wanted a participatory venture.   I wanted people to share the joy of painting and the satisfaction of making a painting, regardless of whether they know how to paint or not.

For this I need to devise a fail safe method.  One that would work for 6 years old, as well as 60 years old.

I created a whole bunch of stencils, such that visitors could trace these templates onto their drawing paper.

The stencil ensures a basic shape for the visitor to start out with their painting, and takes away the apprehension that associates with many first-timers.

A traced outline from the stencil

For the sake of simplicity, I decided to use just ink and a single color red for the rooster.  Red is essential because it is the auspicious color in our culture.  We can't celebrate a new year with the color red.
First order after establishing the basic outline is to add in the beak and the eye.

Now paint in the neck feather

Now load the brush with ample water and ink and write in the feathers on the chest and body using discrete dabs

Write in the leg

Complete the toes and the leg in the back which is curled up

Tie in the leg to the body with additional brush dabs

Write in the big rooster feathers

Using red color, begin to write in the comb

Completed rooster with wattles, ear lobe and face.

I shall be putting this to practice pretty soon.

( NO ) Strings attached

Two of my paintings needed mounting and framing.  They got juried into an exhibition.  One of those was the one I named Oblivious; the "have eyes but won't see" painting.  This was especially uplifting, as I felt vindicated, after being rejected twice by other venues.  I was told by the curator that the reason for rejection was "the faces are not familiar to the west".  I didn't know I was signing up for a course in Bovine Scatology!  On the other hand, it exemplified the caliber of the show!  Might as well!

Again I mounted them in the Suliao Xuan Ban fashion, and again I stained my frames with the same ink I painted with to achieve that tonal continuity between the painting and the frame.

I devised a new method to combat the bubbles that popped up under the paper.  This was probably due to defects in the silicone layer.  I used a stress ball as a roller to help tamp the Xuan onto the heated silicone surface.  The ball was very pliable and made even contact with the surface when pressed.  The added bonus was that I got to massage my acupressure points in my palm (wink, wink).

I modified my hanging string this time.

I had used the regular metal picture wires before for the cross string.  That was until my confidant pointed out to me that the wire was visible through the clear margin that I had painstakingly designed.  My reason for that clear margin ( in lieu of a traditional mat) was to exaggerate the float effect of the painting.  I also wanted to free the painting from the immediate enclosing feeling of the frames.  So after having these thoughts executed into the design of the setup, I ruined it by allowing the viewer to see a metal wire through the acrylic pane. That was more than a fly in the ointment.  This is a mistake that I often make.  I am always in a hurry to finish a project that I would not think through the last few steps.  I will write these steps off as being incidental and trivial and not critical.  I just have no patience; too eager to call it done.  That's the bane of my life.

To make the hanging wire less visible, I thought of the leader system of fishing hooks, harking back to the days when I would ford the streams and fish a little bit.  I would use the regular metal hanging wire, but instead of the entire length, I would tie both ends to clear fishing lines.  This way the clear fishing lines were under the clear acrylic margin, and were not readily visible.  The reason I did not use fishing line for the whole length to begin with was because the length of the wire was too long in the landscape setup.  The weight of the wood frame and the plastic caused the wire to stretch too much, resulting in the hanging hook visible above the frame.  That destroyed the presentation.  I wanted to frame to just appear on the wall, without any obvious means of hanging or attachment.

I drilled a 90 degree angled passage in the narrow wood frame and passed my fishing line through that.  I then tied a huge knot;  one that was big enough to not slip through the tiny hole, thus securing the line.  I then tied the clear fishing line to the metal hanging wire.  The beauty of this design was that no hanging hardware was required, and the hanging hook would be hidden by the painting itself.

This is how the finished product looked on the wall.
 No visible hooks or wires!

Sulio Xuan Ban and Xuan Boo in action

I have mentioned my unique ways of mounting Chinese brush paintings in my blogs.  Xuan-Boo is how I mounted Xuan on canvas.  Suliao Xuan Ban is mounting Xuan on plastic.

I have been labelled as being "gimmicky" by the camp of traditional brush artists.  In my defense, I was motivated by circumstances.

The traditional way of mounting Xuan on paper or silk is great.  Unfortunately, having paintings mounted in a scroll format demands skilled craftsmanship.  There just aren't too many of these floating around when one is in a town where such crafts are rather obscure and esoteric.  I could have mounted the Xuan on paper and present it in a picture frame, but I see two limitations.  The first one being the glass frame imposes a glare, and museum grade non-glare glass is not economical and not often available in the odd sizes.  The second factor is that the painting loses the vivaciousness once dried.  I like the wet look so much better.

When I first fooled around with Xuan-Boo, I was instantly attracted to it.  The texture of the canvas and the color luminosity being restored by applying the protective gel.  The application of gel was to protect the surface of the painting from the usual indoor elements.   I had no idea that it added to the depth of the color.  That truly was serendipity in action.

I really like a lot of the "metallic" prints of photographs and the way they were presented.  No frames, just sort of floated from the wall.  That was my inspiration for devising the Suliao Xuan Ban technique.  I compromised on the absence of frame by creating a clear margin around the painting, allowing it to float on the display wall.

There are ongoing debates about the merits of wet versus dry mounting.  Chinese wet mounting has been the gold standard in the traditional way.  Having done both I would say that a nicely done wet mounting is superior to the dry mounted one.  This is especially apparent when one can hold that piece of work in your hands.  It just feels organic and not mechanical.  A point that the wet mounting camp stresses is that a dry mount is irreversible.  Museums have been know to re-mount a piece of deteriorated ancient work and restore the painting.  This would not be possible with dry mount.  But then again, how many pieces of our works gain immortality?  Of course the main reason for dry mounting is that the execution generally requires less skill, and is definitely not as time consuming.

Some people at the local galleries balk at the idea that the painting is mounted.  They asserted that the painting must retain the flexibility of being  able to be presented in the frame of the customer's choosing.  In other words, the consumer might not like the way I presented it, and would need to replace the frame.  They are in effect paying money for the painting itself and nothing else.

Recently I had a chance to present exclusively my two methods of mounting at an exhibition.  I did that obviously to satisfy my own biases and I really don't expect the audience to know one way or another.
It was gratifying to see how my presentation was so vastly different from everybody else's.

These are paintings done in the Xuan-Boo fashion:

These are done in the Suliao Xuan Ban fashion:

Call me a goofball, call me a gimmick,  I'm just not satisfied with the status quo.