Putting old latex paint to use

 I was trying to clean up my garage and found some latex paint test samples.  Since the chemicals collecting stations had been shut down due to the Covid situation, I thought I would find some way to use them up.  I wonder if I could paint with them.

Found my old Ram painting at hand and that was as good a guinea pig as any, for my latex paint experiment.

I started out with the ram on the bottom.  The first thing I noticed was the ability for the paint to hide everything.

The second thing I found out was how thick the paint was, and it rendered my soft hair brushes totally limp, with no ability to rebound.  Now I understand why the paint stores sell stiff nylon bristle paint brushes.  I was just glad that I didn't use my "nice" brushes for my experiment and I was also quick to clean my brushes out the moment I was done with one section.

I really wasn't planning on documenting the whole process so I didn't take pictures along the way.  I only had the finished experiment to show here:

I also painted a couple canvas in red and wanted to dry mount a couple of my zodiac animals on them.

I did the Ox painting first and quickly learned that the paper I painted on was too thin and allowed the red from the canvas to shine through.  That was a bummer.

For my Pig, Zhu Bajie, I painted the area where the painting was going to be mounted a cream color, with the same latex paint sample that I painted the rams.  My theory was that if any color was going to filter through the thin paper, it wouldn't be red.

My theory worked, and I received an education on how important the backing is for paintings done on Xuan paper.

It was a fun way to re-purpose some old latex paint, canvas and old paintings. 

Finishing Multnomah Falls

 After a couple of weeks looking at my bouquets of flowers adorning the Multnomah Falls, I felt less offended by the painting.  Granted it wasn't what I had in mind but it had its own nuances.

Anyways I needed to go through with what I had imagined originally.  So I liberally applied my cinnabar to showcase the fall foliage.  They were no longer these timid dots but a full blown fall color with aplomb.  

I was having problem with the darkest black level along the bottom of the painting.  The ink I was using dried to a muted black.  So I broke out my special very "black" ink and overpaint those areas, and also used that to better define my tree silhouettes on the right hand side.  Notice I used the black smudges to contrast with the lack of which on the left side of the painting.  Same as I chose a composition where the upper fall was not at dead center, especially in relation to the lower fall.  I thought such contrast added interest to the painting.

I really enjoyed the highlighting done on the bridge.  It really set off the bridge against the background. I am convinced that this is an advantage of western painting over traditional Chinese painting, if one's concern was realism.  All this time I was thinking how I would have portrayed the bridge if I had to use classical Chinese brush methods.  I probably would have left a misty void behind the bridge to set it up and gave it distance from the background. 

The painting was being wet mounted.

Framed Multnomah Falls painting.

How does that grab you

I was trying to clean out my room and spotted something in the pile destined for the paper recycle bin. It was a painting from that I had started long ago but never finished.  More like a doodling than a painting actually.

I felt the urge to add something to the painting.  I had nothing to lose, it was half way out the door already.  Anyways I finished it in the wee hours of the night and took a picture.  What came to mind was the word Avatar.  How about the Dawn of Times

So I took another picture the next morning, under normal daylight. A different white balance gave the painting a different personality.

I like the night time version better.  Anyways, it was a fun way to have spent a couple of hours.

Multnomah Falls

A major part of the historic Old Columbia River Highway was reopened not long ago, iteafter the landslide was cleared away and damaged section repaired. One could again drove to the many different falls dotting the highway.  I recently painted the Vista House from the Columbia River Gorge, and was itching to paint the Multnomah Falls again.

I must have tried 3 or 4 different iterations of the Multnomah Falls over the years and I realized that my approach to this subject matter was different each time.  I was more or less bound by the Chinese brush doctrines before, despite my inadequacy and being a poor student.  I decided that I was going to rid all shackles and just paint this time.

I chose a rather thick, very fibrous "leather" Xuan this time.  The fibers added texture and the thick leathery Xuan was absorbent, yet allowed the water to float a bit before being assimilated, not unlike watercolor paper.

The first rule I broke was to paint the water of the Falls.  Normally I would define the water with the negative void space.  In fact from what I was taught, the using of a white color to paint water was frowned upon.  Treating water by painting it was quite liberating.  In fact that was the very first thing I did, painting the water of the Falls, using lighter grades of ink intermingled in the titanium white streaks to signal a flow.

As for the cliffs from which the falls clung to, I used broad dabs of a mixture of colors, setting the base tones of the landscape and accenting particular colors to set the stage for the features that I planned to portray, i.e. mist, sky, top of the cliff etc.  At one of my painting lessons, I was asked to randomly splash red and phthalocyanine blue onto the Xuan paper and then tried to make some sense of the resulting splash pattern and create a landscape from these two colors.  I was employing the same principle with this painting, albeit the mix was a lot tamer. There were tons of overlapping brushstrokes, totally against the etiquette of not covering the previous brushstrokes as prescribed in a proper Chinese brush painting method.  Again, this was liberating.  I felt like I was doing an oil painting, and my thick leathery Xuan was a perfect cohort and took the abuse with such poise.

Oh, did I also confess that I cheated, well sort of, by sketching out with charcoal my Falls and the bridge etc. on the back of my translucent Xuan first?  It was much easier to follow the lines and paint on the top side, especially for the water.

I think some of the charcoal from the back of the paper might have gotten incorporated into the paper once the moisture from the top side reached it.  This actually worked out great, especially as far as the edges of the Falls and the silhouette of the bridge was concerned.  It added depth to the brushstrokes and rendered a 3-D effect.  Something I might need to explore in the future and warrant further experimentation. 

The painting actually didn't look half bad at this point.  I could have passed it for a blurry, mystic interpretation of the Falls?  But that wasn't what I set out to do, so forge on!

I intended a fall color for the Falls, thus the yellow dots were the base color for my cinnabar.

I seemed to have run into a dead end.  I didn't like the painting at this stage.  It felt like the landscape was dotted with bouquets of flowers instead of a fall foliage. I wished I had stopped at the stage when the painting looked kind of fuzzy.

Time to rest.  Give the painting a rest,  Give myself a rest. 

 

Mounting my demo pieces

I decided to mount the two pieces of paintings from the demo session at the wetlands.  I happened to pick the very fibrous and thick "leather" Xuan as the paper to paint on that day, so the mounting should be relatively easy.

I would be wet mounting them as usual.  I've discussed and debated with people concerning the dry silicone mounting method.  If I brought my hubris to the table, I would have said that the dry method was for those who either didn't know how to, or lacked the skill to do the wet mount.  I have personally tried both methods, and have even tried ironing commercial food wrap as a binder, but I've always preferred the wet mounting method, despite the many cumbersome steps it requires.  Call me a snob but there is a je ne sais quoi quality about a starched, perfectly stretched and flat piece of work from the wet mounting that dry mounting can never hold a candle to.  I would however use dry mounting if I chose to present my painting mounted under a piece of glass.  In that case I would have used the very thin, semi-sized "cicadas wing" Xuan as my painting paper, and the added reflective layer of the silicone binder provides a seemingly ephemeral, yet perceptive richness to the color and the translucent paper when viewed through the glass pane.  I guess that's what linseed oil does to color pigments.

The doors on my storage cabinet are covered with smooth mylar, perfect as a mounting surface.

Being a good student of wet mounting, I even included a blow hole provision on the right side of the mount.  Supposedly one is to blow through this passage such that the wet painting is lifted from the mounting surface ever so slightly, to prevent sticking from any bleed through starch.  I personally have found this to be more academic than practical.  The lifting seems to occur around the blow hole area only.  Perhaps I am not doing this correctly or that I need more than one blow hole. In reality I've almost never encountered any paintings stuck on the mounting surface when dried.

Depicting a straw connected to the blow hole 

The dried paintings were taken off the mounting surfaces and stamped with my seals and were ready to be framed.

So I examined the landscape painting and noticed my geese were bigger than the water buffaloes. Hence scale wise it seemed like I failed, in a hurry or not, during that 30 minutes demo.  But logically, I could dig myself out by saying that the painting represented a view from a drone flying overhead, with the geese much closer to the lens than the buffaloes.  Right?  How else could the distant background be placed so far up in the painting, composition wise.  Could this be the scattered focal point perspective in play?  Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Demo

I was invited to do an hour long demonstration at a local wetlands preserve.  This was in response to my painting of the wetlands, which I had posted on this blog.

I quickly realized that Chinese brush landscape painting was not a good match for the en plein aire mode of painting.  I needed a flat table and not a sketch pad or easel, and I needed a wool under pad for my Xuan paper.  Something that would be harder to disguise would be my reluctance to do serious work in front of an audience.  I felt that when I paint, it was my private moment, as I would be grabbling with my thoughts and feelings.  I would feel naked and exposed if there was someone watching.  Besides, I believe a lot of the classical Chinese landscape paintings were never about the actual sceneries, but rather stories about virtues, or euphemistic depictions of retreat.  Thus the artists conjured up the scenery, almost like building a studio set for a movie, to get their point across.

I thought a more appropriate approach would be to demonstrate how the Chinese round brush works.   I would still try to paint the wetlands, or at least describe my thought process in arriving at the painting, but I thought a more dramatic demonstration was needed to call attention to the round brush.  I decided to paint a peony flower.  Painting a peony demanded the full employment of the entire brush, from tip to belly.  The tip of the brush helped with creating the serrated edge of the petal, and the belly was used to describe the petal.  Typically the entire brush would be loaded with titanium white and the tip alone would entertain a different color, depending on the color of the peony.  Thus a single brushstroke rendered two different colors, with white being the belly of the brush and the colored tip would contrast with the adjacent void space to create the petal's edge.  It would be easy to understand why the proper placement of the brush is of paramount importance.  

Since I only had 60 minutes to attempt to explain and paint two different paintings, I thought I would cheat a little.  I would have a painting of two peony flowers, with one of them already painted at home.  In other words I would show up with a peony painting with one flower missing, so all I had to do would be to fill in the blank.

Obviously I needed to do my part, honing my peony flower skills.  I didn't want to make a fool of myself.

I prepared two paintings of peony, done on different kinds of Xuan.  I hoped to have a chance to illustrate how absorbency affected the presentation of the brushstroke.

I also planned a little theatre to get one of my points across, the fact that a painting on Xuan had to be mounted in order to be presented.  I planned on squishing my finished peony painting as if to dispose of it, and upon disapproval, I would wet the painting down to relax the paper fibers, to impress the audience that the wetting down was the initial step to ready the painting for mounting.

My stop watch told me that I needed 15 to 20 minutes to paint the flower.  That meant I had at least 30 minutes to do my landscape painting of the wetlands.  Time management would be critical during the demonstration and this was how I prepared myself.

I invoked the Mustard Seed Garden manual as a witness to my interpretation of a mixed species woods, which the wetland had.  I started out with the darkest ink value and proceeded to pan out my landscape.

I pointed out the fact that I wasn't constantly reloading my brush with ink, since I wanted to ink to gradually be depleted which led to a lighter value.  This was how the different ink tones could develop naturally, if we allowed them.  I would intersperse my talking strategically to allow my brush time to become drier as I yakked.  I let the audience in on my ploys, so that they knew what I was doing at all times.  I tried hard to dispel any myths or hypes to using the Chinese brush as an instrument to paint.

As the brush became drier, I proceeded with the Chuen technique, which granted more information about the rocks; and the Ts'a technique, which was rubbing with the dried belly of the brush to add texture.

I had time to add the obligatory pair of Canada geese, showcasing the calligraphy brushstroke.  I punned the painting by adding in a pair of water buffaloes ( it would be strange to see water buffaloes in this neck of the woods) blaming it on the fact that this is the year of the Ox.  It was just a spur of the moment jest to show what could be done with a few simple brushstrokes.

And so the hour flew by and mission accomplished.

And these were the results:

Finishing up my Gorge painting

I looked at my dried painting in day light and it certainly looked quite different from the dim incandescent light, and the color wasn't as exaggerated as when the painting was still wet.

 I thought I could tone the color luminescence down further.  This would be a good time to make the bluff side of the painting darker, since it was situated with the light behind it.  I know in the classical sense, Chinese landscape paintings seldom pay homage to lighting effects, but my current work was too "contemporary".  So what the heck.

 The darkened right lower half the painting contrasted with the brighter left side of the painting.  The darker sky also made the distant horizon more visible, showcasing the the distance perspective.  I used a cold color, blue, to describe mountain ranges far away; as our atmosphere absorbed most of the other color wavelength.

Titanium white was used to bring out the Vista House, otherwise it would had been swallowed up by the red wash of the sky.

At a glance, the painting assumed a diagonal composition.  I could see a play between the upper left hand corner and the lower right hand corner.  I suppose my interest in photography encouraged me to pay attention to light values.  Conversely I believe my painting hobby made my photography better, making me more aware of composition.

The one contrast I did not intend to make was the washed out contour lines from the landscape on the right.  The repeated staining to adjust the tonal quality had buried my original lines.  The visible shorelines on the left did not bode well with the vague shorelines on the right.  This was definitely not a ying versus yang contrast. 

What I did intend to contrast was the way I painted the lobes of the mountains.  Normally the ridge of the lobes is the lightest and the darkest value is assigned to the area just beyond the contour line, where the gully between the lobes lie.  This is the part where streams form and vegetations grow.  The left side of the painting exemplified this practice.  On the right side of the painting however, the ridge had the darkest value.  I did that to suggest the presence of mist seeping through the mountain range from the right.  The voids on the cliff face hopefully set the stage for the visualization.  Hence the landscape on opposite sides of the river had opposite treatments to the ridges.  Granted, this was a rather obscure and perhaps insignificant observation.  Is this a case when some wine snob tells you that there is a hint of black currant, strawberry, chocolate and apricot in the wine and your response is forget the hype, just drink the damn wine?

Anyways this was what I arrived at.

The shorelines on the right side were re-established.  The exposed rocky surface of the bluff was given more texture.

Somehow the painting looked quite desolate, reclusive.  I was so tempted to paint in a few sail boats on the river,  or some transiting geese.  But then given the context that this was during the Covid-19 pandemic, perhaps it was appropriate to feel sort of detached and isolated?

Eventually I couldn't stop the itching, I had to do something to the painting, to make it a little more personable.  I vividly recalled that white caps are a frequent occurrence in the gorge, hence the city of Hood River is a favorite wind surfing destination.  It would be difficult to paint the waves and the white caps to scale, given the vastness of scenery.  My excuse was that the painting was a little bit impressionistic anyways, so what the heck.  If you want true realistic images, then get your own camera out.  

Traditionally I would not have used titanium white to accent the white breakers, but since precedent was set by applying that to the Vista House, I felt justified.

Wow, that was different!  My painting had just assumed a different persona.  It now had drama.

The waves not only provided additional scenic texture, but also provided a foreground to the painting.  Up until this point, I didn't even know the foreground was missing. 

This might have been an example of the tail wagging the dog.  Painting the water was never in the construct when I planned the painting; yet I couldn't take my eyes off of it now.  In painting, as in life, sometimes a tiny insignificant afterthought could morph into a primary impetus and  change your status quo totally.  

After the novelty wore off, I decided to darken the foot of the bluff further more to create more of a contrast with the lit side of the painting.  

The darkening was done by more ink staining from the back of the paper.  I didn't want the ink to obscure too much of what was on the top layer of the paper already, I had already deposited too many layers of color, very unbecoming of what I was taught in traditional Chinese painting.  The translucent nature of the paper allowed me the freedom to color from the back.

The paper was not mounted yet so it was creating its own shadows from all the localized dimples but the darkened bluff face at least looked credible, as it was in the shadow.