River Gorge Landscape

 

With the furor of Covid-19 still raging, the outdoors is perhaps a relatively safe place for a respite  The Pacific Northwest certainly has its claim of fame, as far as picturesque vistas are concerned, but even the famous Multnomah Falls was off limits for a lengthy period, to curb crowding.  The Falls is located in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic area, some 40 miles east of the city of Portland, and driving there is a wonderful way to spend an hour motoring.   Once you are outside of the city limits, the freeway opens up to relaxed cruising.  Or you can take the Old Columbia River Highway for a even more scenic and leisurely drive.  The Vista House perching on a bluff overlooking the river is your introduction to the Columbia River Gorge and many small falls dotting the Old Highway.

One has seen images of the Gorge and the Vista House countless times, but it never gets old.  I'll add my footprint to that collection.

I started out by laying down the bluff and the surrounding landscape.

The exposed rock cliffs were colored with a mixture of burnt sienna and vermillion, colors that were left in my dish and I rehydrated them.  Waste not, want not.  

I decided to use an opaque color for the trees on the bluff and in-between the rocky slabs. I mixed Blue Hue with Yellow, toned down with ink to make it less vivid.

 

For the rest of the grounds I used a transparent green color, mixing my own yellow and indigo

I used the two different kinds of green, in both hue and opacity, to help me differentiate the different terrains.  

As it turned out, my palette hues were a little too vibrant.  I blamed it on my choice of using left over vermillion, which made the color too bright.  That had a rippling effect and affected the way I perceived my colors as I was continuing to paint.  I am sure my dim incandescent lamp with a beige shade had something to do with it too.  More on this later.

I ran a freeway at the bottom of the bluff, along the river's edge.  I tried to impart a smidgen of  truthfulness to the overall feel of the scenery, although I had taken some liberty to the details of the landscape.  I gathered that the silhouette of the relatively contemporary Vista House plus the bright color palette of the painting so far, definitely did not lend itself to the strict classical depiction of landscape.  I might as well insert the modern infrastructures.  I actually considered painting in power transmission towers and wind turbines.  

Since I was already on the road to some bright coloration applications, I might as well make the sky dramatic by using a bright red color, as a backdrop to the Vista House.  Go with the flow, right?

I needed to take a break and give myself a chance to evaluate what I had done so far.  

I alluded to the fact that I was painting under a dim light with a bad lamp shade.  For some reason I seem to function better in cramped quarters with less than ideal surroundings.  Most of my painter friends would create an atelier in a bright room with picture windows and a huge desk.  I am the exact opposite.  I suspect it had something to do with my upbringing.  I had never had a room that I could call my own, and had always slept on a sofa while growing up.  Living in the city there was never a moment of silence.  I had gotten used to that and adapted well.  In fact, I could never study in the library.  It was too quiet.  I needed to have the TV set or radio on, as background noise.  The noisier is the environment, the better I could concentrate.

I feel naked and helpless in a bright, nicely furnished room.  I often pick a corner desk with no windows in cramped quarters to paint,  I get an adrenaline rush when I paint or study in the wee hours of the day, when I know I should be in bed.   I'm more inspired for some reason under those circumstances. 

Revisiting an old landscape sketch

 As I was trying to repair my vintage record player I got to experience the joy of accomplishment, for having been able to make my turntable work for a little while.  I also suffered the disappointment from defeat, having screwed around with something that was clearly beyond my expertise; rendering my turntable into a bipolar machine,  inexplicably vacillating between 33 and 45 rpm while playing a record.  I reflected on that experience and saw similarities in how some Chinese brush painting students failed.  Often times knowing a little bit about a subject is more dangerous than being totally ignorant.  Just because one could make a mark with a wet brush doesn't necessarily mean one knows  to write or paint with a Chinese brush.  The fact that I could solder and know which end of a capacitor is negative doesn't make me a electronics repairman. 

I tried to nurse my nerves and took my mind off the anxiety in fixing the turntable by motivating myself to practice the fundamentals in Chinese brush painting.  I picked orchid painting because of the close similarity between painting orchid and calligraphy.  There shall be a day when I could be proud of my orchids, I consoled myself with platitude.

I was working on a parallel project in the mean time.  I also had my eyes on an old landscape sketch that I had pinned to the plaster wall.

I was trying to depict a classical Chinese garden; a place that is rigidly structured, yet offers ample room for free contemplation and so much beauty.  The sketch was done sometime ago and I had it pinned up so I could cast a wandering gaze at it from time to time, to see what needed to be worked on further.  I do this religiously with almost all my works.  I find such casual scrutiny beneficial and serendipitous.  

Unfortunately the child in me led me to launch a drone in the room where I paint.  The drone rose from the floor with the ushering of the joystick on the control tablet, but veered by itself sideways ( obviously some phantom force was involved, I couldn't be the person doing that !) into my pinned sketch.  Well the exposed blades of the drone chopped up part of my sketch and tore it off the wall.  I picked the carcass up from the floor and pinned it back on and it stayed there until now.  I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to see if I could mend the painting, along with my turntable.

I was dividing my time between the orchid exercise and the garden restoration.  Ink was the only color used for my orchid practice and the garden required an assortment of colors.  I didn't want cross contamination of my ink dish with my color dishes.  

I started by coloring my roofing and trees, to establish a mood.  Well that wasn't exactly true.  I was rehydrating the left over pigments in my color dishes, and they happened to be hues of green and indigo and vermillion.  I was picking from left overs.  

For some of the trees I used a blue hue for leaves, just to add a little variety.

I used a yellow underlayer of color on yet other trees, and on the willow.

When green was painted over the yellow undercoat, it presented a different hue, and the occasional yellow that came through added to the nuance of the palette. 

 

I decided to jazz the painting up a little by giving it an aged and weathered look, with the help of burnt sienna.

The color wash and the travel of the brush tore off parts of the paper, since the propellers from my drone initiated the shredding some time ago.  

I decided I was too timid with the burnt sienna, so I summoned tea stain mixed with ink, and more burnt sienna.

My weathered look scheme was coming alive.

After the wash had dried sufficiently, I decided the painting needed more adornment.  I reached for the metallic gold acrylic from my tool chest and painted the hip roofs and the flying eaves golden.  

The new attire bestowed a different personality to the painting.  The metallic gold actually looked good over the vermillion undercoat.  It had a persona of old relics or artifacts from temples

After I had a few days to ponder and ruminate on what I had done so far, I decided to accost more details to the painting.  I decided some of the leaves on the trees could use a better definition.  I also decided to make the plants behind the rocks in the middle of the painting more lucid, the juxtaposing of the Taihu stones rendered them obscure.   I painted some bamboo leaves and gave them an ink outline, as I did selectively with some leaves at strategic positions in the painting. 

Some will accuse me of succumbing to pedantry, indiscriminately bombarding the painting with fluffy details to conceal my less than perfect brushstrokes.  My answer would be that until I was ready to be starkly naked, I would always dress up with something that complements my personality.  

I reminded myself often, I do this for fun.  In this particular case, I was trying to revive a sketch, executing parallel exercises between fixing my record player, practicing painting orchid and this.

In the end, I enjoyed all three events, a complete failure in electronics repair notwithstanding.

As the saying goes, it's all about the journey and not the destination.

Enough said.

Reliving The Past

With Covid still unabated I needed to find something to do.  Something useful, something stimulating to do.

I saw the pile of old vinyl LP records leaning haphazardly on my bowing plank shelves and decided that perhaps I could digitize them so that I could have them in my music library and stream them at my leisure.  My records are 20 to 50 years old.  I still have a few that were my dad's.  I have my nice "audiophile"  turntable and my computer has the Audacity program installed.  Should be a walk in the park.

I eagerly cleaned off the dust collecting on the lid of my record changer.  Hooked up the RCA outs from the turntable to a 3.5mm stereo adapter and plugged into the headphone jack of my computer.

I acknowledged to my computer that I was plugging a line input; not a microphone; not a headset.  I then opened the lid to my turntable and pressed "On".

Nothing happened. 

My turntable is from the 90's.  At the time it could be considered a nice turntable and had the touch sensitive capacitance buttons for changing play speed.  I so loved this piece of machinery.  It was so futuristic.  It has not been powered up for at least 20 years.

So I had a failed power switch.  Removing the bottom of the turntable confirmed my diagnosis.  The plastic casing of the switch succumbed to the pressure from the spring inside.   I fired off an order to procure a new power switch that would fit my machine.

The new switch came.  I installed it.  Powered my turntable on and the capacitance buttons lit up.  I was almost like a new parent.

I pressed the "33" play button and it flickered for a bit and jumped to the Stop button; all by itself.  So this happy new parent grew very concerned.  My new baby was not healthy.

A quick research online revealed that my vintage turntable was prone to capacitor failure and described some of the problems I was witnessing.  I had tinkered with soldering and building my vacuum tube  radio when I was a teenage so I decided that replacing a few capacitors was not beyond my abilities.

One of the casualty of Covid was that a huge chain store which sells electronic parts for hobbyist closed its door for good.  I had no choice but to buy parts online.  I couldn't buy just one.  Capacitors came in strips of 5 or 10.  I suppose that was the price to pay for wanting to relive the past.

While waiting for my parts to arrive I decided to practice my Ji Ben Gong ( basic skills ) by painting orchids.  Orchid paintings are favorite subjects for Chinese brush painting and they require exquisite brushstrokes to emanate the beauty and the reclusiveness of the plant.  Strictly speaking the so called "painting" is actually a collection of calligraphy writings, and these calligraphic brushstrokes bestow the abstract and impressionistic qualities of such paintings.  

My training in orchid painting, like most of my Chinese brush trainings, is by rote learning.  Almost all my teachers demanded repeated studying and emulations of known paintings, and rehearsing the necessary brushstrokes to acquire the skill of orchid painting; all in the name of developing Ji Ben Gong.  Obviously the downside of this practice is that all orchid paintings look alike, since the same brushstrokes and compositions were practiced incessantly, not only by me, but by all serious students.

Since I haven't painted an orchid for a long time, I decided to start by doodling and trying to recall my muscle memory of orchid painting.

Honestly I was doing this to kill time, while I awaited the capacitors to arrive so that I could repair my vintage turntable and get on with my project of digitizing my old vinyl records.

I constantly looked at my tracking page from the vendors, as if this would hasten up the delivery of my needed parts.  I was being a kid again.

The day came when the brown delivery truck pulled up next to my door.  I ripped the capacitors from the packaged strip array of 5's, almost with the same fervor as trying to open up a package of prophylactic for the very first time, and impatiently waited for my soldering iron to heat up; fidgeting with the new capacitors to determine which lead was negative, so that I would not reverse polarity when inserting my new capacitors. 

I replaced two capacitors on the circuit board, put the screws back in and fired up my turntable.

Success!  My newborn had been cured.  I was a jovial new parent again.  Now I could use my vintage equipment to relive my past again.  In Da Gadda Da Vida, White Rabbit...........

Working with Audacity and iTunes was such fun.  My digitized music library was growing slowly and the past was definitely worth reliving.  I streamed part of the collection to my sound system, and it sounded awesome, the fact that I could no longer hear beyond 10 kilohertz notwithstanding.  

It was all in my head.  There was no better way to endure the pandemic by doing what I was doing.  Useful, stimulating.

Orchid painting can wait.  After all I was just trying to brush up my basic skills in painting by revisiting the past.  It really wasn't tops in my agenda.

Then one day the STOP button light on my turntable would not come on.  I thought my deck was unplugged.  The lights worked on the 33 and 45 buttons.  

Must be a burned out lightbulb.  How difficult could it be to replace the lightbulbs.  

Off came the bottom of the turntable.  I located the tiny lightbulbs underneath the capacitance buttons and switched out the bulb for 45 with the STOP, since I don't play 45's.  Put everything back and to my chagrin the turntable was saddled with erratic speed switching on its own.

Further research revealed that the circuit used the resistance of the lightbulbs in its capacitance calculations.  The tiny current draw by placing one's finger on these capacitance buttons was tied in to the lightbulbs and therefore this was a scenario where not just any lightbulb would work.  A  set of 3 lightbulbs for this particular turntable would cost me $21 to buy.  Should I just buy them and possibly exorcise my erratic speed demon?

I wasn't so sure at this point.  I looked at the schematic and it showed the correct voltage at different points of the wiring schematic.  I figured with a little patience I could retrace the different paths of the schematic and with the 6 different potentiometers on the circuit board surely I could adjust the voltage to spec without replacing the burnt lightbulb and my vintage machine would work again.  Besides this could offer me a new experiences to tinker or experiment with something.  Just like painting, I told myself.

As I was contemplating my moves, I went back to my Ji Ben Gong exercises.  Something to do to take my mind off the broken record player.  My muscle memory was slowly coming back.  I could see my brushstrokes getting better and more fluent within the matter of the weeks while I was toying with fixing my turntable.

In the spirit of toying and experimentation, with the same aplomb applied to trying to fix my old equipment, I tried painting on a matte photo paper.  Curious to see what it was like.

The result was not ideal.  The photo paper called me out by amplifying my indecisiveness in my brushstrokes.  They seemed a little pretentious and not spontaneous enough, especially with regards to the petals of the orchid.

In the days and weeks that ensued I realized that I was in over my head with fixing my turntable.  I did not have a basic understanding of the schematic or how the circuit was designed and I based my optimism on the assumption that I could somehow adjust the voltage to spec.  With 6 different potentiometers and a burnt out lightbulb that I kept turning and  switching around I had totally lost track of what I had touched and altered.  I was lost in a deep canyon with no identifiable landmarks.

Back to the drawing board, literally.

I started out with the leaves of the orchid plant.  As I had mentioned before in my blogs about traditions, I was mindful to keep the phoenix eye in the basic construct of the leaf arrangement.

Although the so called host and slave leaves were not well defined, the nuance of such a relationship still governed the composition in this complex arrangement.  Is this the only way to portray orchid?  I would hope not; but old habits are hard to break, especially for students of rote learning.  This type of presentation nonetheless provide a comfortable space, for both the viewer, and the painter.

So the pandemic is not relenting and my vintage record player suffered a fatal blow from my malpractice.  In retrospect the viral pandemic offered me more leisure time to do something that I normally wouldn't have done, and my desire to relive or to preserve the past led to my attempt to convert analog tracks to digital bits.  I see a parallel in my naïve determination to tackle something that I only had a superficial knowledge of and my painting by rote.  In electronics repair I thought I could follow the schematic and somehow attain the correct voltage without knowing what led to the deviation to begin with.  In painting by rote, I followed the traditions without clearly understanding what dictated that practice.  My saving grace is that sometimes I have more gall than brain and sometimes good things happen.  The truth is that my painting attempts could be serendipitous but luck is more stingy when dealing with technical issues.  One has to have Ji Beng Gong, or the basics, by hook or by crook.

How else could I be vacillating between euphoria and despair, but by sucked in by the romantic notion, that I could hold on to things in the past and relive them.  However, on this date, I bid adieu to my vintage turntable, a small but significant part of my past.  

Ox painting, the final saga

After four attempts at painting my ox, realizing incremental improvement after each trial, I was left with a void, a less than satisfying feeling, still.

I couldn't quite pinpoint what prompted this notion.  Perhaps my painting didn't tell a story, like my Year of the Rat or Year of the Rooster paintings did.  Perhaps the ambience of the painting wasn't befitting a New Year's theme and was too monolithic.  Or could it be that it wasn't "Chinese" enough, since I was ruminating the connotation of whether a painting is "Chinese" or not.  How could I translate a sentiment that is beyond my capability to be succinct about; beyond my wisdom to verbalize.  

One thing that was within my reach was to try to tell a story with my intended painting, beyond just a representation of vigor and might.  My reason to start painting the ox painting was ostensibly due to the arrival of the Year of the Ox, but also the desire to expel anything that went awry during the Year of the Rat.  My painting of the Ox could be the rostrum for such proclamation.

Thus my painting would tell the story of an ox evicting the rat. More than merely a changing of the guards.

Honestly I was getting a little tired of painting the same ox over and over again.  I was never a good student because I loathed practicing.  I always wanted something fresh, and fast.  So for this painting I substituted a stiff hair, totally worn round brush for my regular round brush.  I intended to rely on the dry ink mottling, with the help of the regular wash, to render the shading of my beast.  A worn out brush is ideal for this purpose since its hairs form hundreds of points rather than the one single point when new.  Thus I never threw out my worn brushes.  I was hoping the dry ink mottling would add interesting texture and credibility to my ox.  I trust subconsciously I was trying to emulate the smudging of a charcoal painting.  Also I've read somewhere that part of the intrigue of Mona Lisa was the fact that there were no harsh lines on her face, adding to the organic expression of facial emotional contents of a human.  Regardless of my true motivation, I was ready to enter the game.

I cut out a stencil to help depict the skin folds on the nose ridge, adding interest to the structure.

My urge to keep the painting process fresh and interesting had led to this experimentation.  I must admit, I was like a school kid finding a dollar bill on the playground, pure joy!

Chinese or not, here I come.  I expanded the stencil technique to add skin folds to the back of the ox.

Using a rather dry brush, I scriggled lines to represent water, in which my ox was half submerged.

The water solved two problems.  It hid the legs of the ox, so I didn't have to be concerned about their placements.  It also took up a large portion of the painting; less for me to paint.

The other protagonist in this story was the rat.  I painted it white to make it stand out a bit but it was still difficult to see due to its size.  Incidentally I painted last years rat in white, so there is continuity in my story now.  I had the rat scurrying across the water, away from the ox, as if it was being chased away.

I am calling it quits.  This is my final attempt at the ox painting, and I named it 

"The Ox evicting the Rat"

Ox painting, third and fourth attempt

Having realized that my attempt in painting an ox resulted in a painting of a lamb with Dumbo ears, I was determined to give another try.

To remedy the identified shortcomings of my last two ox paintings, I obviously had to make the ears smaller, but I also decided to make the horns having a pronounced upward turn, to shy away from getting confused with the head of a lamb.  I decided to situate my ox in grass, to give it a little context.

I painted the mouth and nostrils, rendering them a dark shade because I was very conscious of avoiding  the pig like snout.

Instead of a rigid triangle for the ridge of the nose, I took the more conventional avenue of shading in the ridge.  The shading brushstroke also defined the white area suggesting the front of the nose and mouth.  I liked this rendition far better than my previous attempts.  

I also decided to dress up the eyes a little better by giving them eyelids.

I realized that I lost sight of my moisture control of my brush, so the ink was bleeding more than I had intended.

My inattention was further exemplified by left front leg, which was fit for an elephant.  Instead of a hoof, I put down a meaty pachyderm foot pad.

At least the beast was animated enough to bestow an attitude, an energetic disposition.

Encouraged by the palpable improvements, I decided to give it another go.

I wanted to try a different treatment of the mouth and nostrils this time around, so I left the area as a void.

Through looking at pictures of a cow, I became aware that the area between the nostrils and the mouth opening had different colors and texture, and was not a simple black or white.  Armed with this revelation, I tried to emulate.

The eyelids were made conspicuous and protruding by judicious use of shading brushstrokes, which were nothing more than a few lines.  

The repeated exercises in painting the same animal had definitely improved my muscle memory and I learned what to avoid, as far as making mistakes was concerned.  I could see painting maturing with each attempt.

I had tried four times now, trying to paint my ox.

Ox painting, first and second attempt

 I wanted to paint an ox for the Chinese New Year to replace the Rat of 2020.  A lot of the Ox paintings portray the ox as lounging around in the meadows, or being strung along by their nose rings.  That was not the image of the ox I wanted to paint.  Another favorite setting for an ox painting would be some little kid riding the ox playing a bamboo flute. 

 Poetic but banal.

Come to think of it, I don't even know what an ox looks like; I might have it confused with a water buffalo?   Does it matter if the zodiac animal is a buffalo or a dairy cow?  Personally I want my animal to have horns and be fierce, sort of like a bull, and certainly not passive.  I've had enough stagnation this past year.   So perhaps I'll paint what I deem is a bull ox, or ox bull ?  Something that could breakthrough the thick miasma from last year.  Not in the cliché sense of auspiciousness but actually taking charge.  Is there such an animal?

Perhaps too much bovine scat here, wink wink.

Thus I started out with a sketch,

I wasn't sure what this animal was, but it sorta fit the bill, so I proceeded to paint in on Xuan paper.  I was using the rough, fibrous kind.  The thick fibers gave a special nuance to the finished product, and functioned as incidentals to hide any imperfections of the painting.  Like trinkets on an empty wall, you get the picture.

I began with the horns and legs, basically trying to establish a general body proportion.  The ears were written as flower petals or leaves, using side tip brushstroke.  The horns and the tail were strictly center tip brushstrokes.

Then I moved onto the mouth and eyes

It was interesting to note that the brushstrokes pertaining to the mouth and eyes lacked the spontaneity exhibited by the horns, tail and legs.  The fact that I was trying to locate the eyes and nostrils in a proper location somehow zapped the energy out of the brush. A gingerly apprehension was evident.

I painted a triangle to represent the ridge of the nose and defined what the plane which housed the nostrils and the mouth.  I meant to darken the area above the eyes to show orbital ridges of the skull but ended up with two very conspicuous eyebrows.

Final touches to fill in the rest of the body,

Immediately the painting looked weird to me.  It finally dawned on me that mouth and nostrils were not only too rigid, as I had mentioned earlier, but I was too conspicuous in my efforts to define that mouth/nose plane and I ended up with the snout of a pig?

After I was done amusing myself, I decided to re-do the painting.  I tried a different profile, with the animal facing the right hand side this time.

I decided to darken the problem area of the mouth/nostril to make that area seem less flat.

Still something didn't look right.  I thought I could make it better by giving the painting a little sepia coloring, but it didn't help.  In my training I've been indoctrinated that ink itself is a color and that's why the ability to manipulate and display different ink tones is held in such high regard in Chinese brush panting, so I couldn't explain why I would even consider a recue by color.  I suppose when one is desperate, one tries anything under the sun.

I eventually came to the conclusion that my animal had too high a dome and resembled a lamb; too big were the ears and it reminded me of Dumbo!

That meant I needed to try my luck with the ox painting again, someday.

For now, I've had my laughs.  

It was definitely entertaining. 

Happy Year Of The Ox

 

Farewell Rat

Hello Ox