I had laid the ground work for my String Theory painting. I got sidetracked by my desire to purchase a custom frame. That was a bad experience.
I needed something to bring me out of my sulking.
So I got myself a new toy.
I am an enthusiast of Chinese Brush Painting and I would like to share my trials and tribulations in learning the craft. I want to document the process, the inspiration and the weird ideas behind my projects and to address some of the nuances related to this dicipline. I hope to create a dialogue and stir up some interest in the art of painting with a Chinese brush on Xuan. In any case, it would be interesting to see my own evolution as time progresses. This is my journal
I had laid the ground work for my String Theory painting. I got sidetracked by my desire to purchase a custom frame. That was a bad experience.
I needed something to bring me out of my sulking.
So I got myself a new toy.
I did some minor alteration to a recent landscape painting. I augmented the phthalo blue patch and garnished it with a few dots of green label#1. It looked contemporary and yet classic at the same time.
Looked decent.
I normally make my own frames for works of weird dimensions. For the popular formats I would just buy picture frames when they are on sale. My landscape painting required a 20 in x 40 in frame. That means custom made.
Instead of dusting off my miter saw and buying poplar stock from the lumber yard, I thought my painting deserved a proper frame. I was sure a proper frame would make my painting more "legit".
Off to the local art supply store I went. I buy my non-Chinese brush related supplies there. Things like mat boards and cutting blades and gel mediums. This art supply store happens to have a custom framing counter.
I presented my painting. I was looking for a skinny black frame (not a cocktail dress, mind you). The simple classic thin-black-rim frame to house my painting. I conveyed my wishes to the people behind the counter. Nothing fancy, just utilitarian.
This was the printout of the work sheet:
I was chatting up a storm with my bunch of nerdy pals. We do not eschew any topics, including sensitive topics like politics and religion. Nothing is too sacred with us. Pun intended.
What started our conversation was the topic of consciousness. None of us have any erudition in this field. This is something that everybody seems to understand yet few could use concrete words to define. Perhaps we all have different words or interpretation or ideas for what consciousness is but we assume that everybody is on the same page. Is it awareness? Is it the mind? A feeling, a cognition, life itself, an introspection or is it the same thing as the soul? What is a soul by the way. Pilot of a plane caught on fire reports to the tower "we are declaring emergency and there are 109 souls on board", is that it?
Some of my friends would borrow from psychology to describe what consciousness is, while most would sweep it under the neural science category. I took a more pragmatic approach. I learned that all living things is nothing more than a factory churning out products, utilizing raw materials and sending signals to regulate the different stations. Life depends on energy exchange via the ATP cycle and nerve signals requiring action potentials to propagate. Hence we have specialized and differentiated cells to perform specific functions of absorption, immunity, visual, auditory, olfactory, reproductive functions. et cetera, et cetera. To put it bluntly, in my humble opinion, we are nothing but the result of trillions of test tubes pouring each other with chemicals. These chemicals form the infrastructures of our body and allow ion exchange to form electrical signals. Our sensory inputs perhaps elicit certain chemicals to be formed, i.e. dopamine, oxytocin, endorphin, and along with sensory signals form experiences that we perceive as real. To me, consciousness is the manifestation of chemicals and electricity. Whatever our consciousness conjures up, is just a summation of all of the above. I wonder if someday we are advance enough to send these packets of chemicals and electrical charges from one individual to another, could we share consciousness? Believing reality is real could be the biggest scam. Our dreams could be so vivid that we believe they are real, until we wake up that is. Oh yes some people called dreams the subconscious. So called "altered states" achieved by using drugs or biologicals (psilocybin for example) are just reactions to chemicals that disrupt our normal production and distribution of chemicals. So when I die, my chemical reactions come to a screeching halt, and my "reality" ceases to exist (except that my hair and nail would continue to grow for a day or two, creepy, right?), whereas just a few moments before I take my last breath, it was still real to me. So is consciousness merely a state of awareness, or does it also imply intelligence, reasoning, morality, ethics? Does the size of our brains have anything remotely to do with consciousness? Does an imbecile have less consciousness than a genius? Does consciousness include the ability to plot and manipulate and backstab others?
An interesting segue regarding the role played by chemicals in our body is that according to the famous psychologist Jordon Peterson, aggressive lobsters posses a higher level of serotonin. He also stipulated that serotonin endowed lobsters attain a higher status in the hierarchy of lobsters, and they strut a better body image i.e. more frequent raised claws. Serotonin by the way is a chemical that carries signals between nerve cells and is responsible for mediating the moods of a person, so we believe. A class of drugs called SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) of which Prozac is an example, works by propping up the level of serotonin in our bloodstream by delaying its metabolism back into the system.
Seeing a person go through puberty, watching animals in heat or simply witnessing the a person high on drugs definitely offers a strong argument of how chemicals shape life. Naysayers would say this is too simplistic. Something as abstract as consciousness surely cannot be defined by chemical terms. Well we are all aware that sunlight is made up of 7 colors. So how easy is it to mix the 7 colors to form the white color. I am not talking about painting the colors on a disc and spinning it to get the white color. That's cheating because we are exploiting the latency in our optic system to mix the colors in our brain. That latency is what fooled us into thinking the frames in a movie strip actually move smoothly. We know we are watching a movie, yet we cry, we laugh, we swear. Are we manufacturing our own reality? Is this consciousness?
It is impossible for us to mix the exact amount and intensity of the different colors to form a white color. Truth of the matter is that white is not a color, it is simply a state when all light are reflected and our brain perceive that as white. All "color" cause certain spectrum of light to be absorbed. Thus whatever "color" we choose to mix will always absorb some light and a total reflection i.e. white could never be achieved. Can the color white actually be not "real"?
The conversation naturally turned to whether afterlife exists. Whatever a person's religious belief, we all subscribe to the fact that all things decompose and breakdown when dead and all the ingredients of life are returned to earth. And if mother earth is a miniscule grain of stardust in one of those 30 trillions of galaxies then are we not all children of this vast universe, and not just earth. Unto dust thou shalt return has real secular meaning. The enormity of our universe is beyond comprehension. The Hubble telescope can see light from 10 billion years ago. James Webb does even better, about 13.5 billion years ago. In other words, someone from one of those far galaxies waved at us, and 13.5 billion years later, we see it.. It took light that long to traverse that distance. If this is not mind boggling, I don't know what is.
By this time, all the members in our nerd group had enlarged pupils, and our voices approaching the soprano tessitura. We all became very animated, saliva spouting from zeal and interjections. It was only natural to invoke the existence of other dimensions. The Outer Limits anthology was non-fiction as far as we were concerned.
When the topic of other dimensions were brought up, the String Theory took the limelight. String Theory came about when particle physics wasn't able to adequately describe nuclear force, gravitational force. Thus instead of particles we have strings that dance through space and depending on how they are vibrating, are able to confer mass and gravitational force by yielding different particles. Mind you we are talking about subatomic structures, before the existence of atoms. String Theory and black holes often seem inseparable. Anyways none of us in the group are physicists but the idea of the obscure "strings" is so "far out", to coin a sixties slang. What is especially "far out" and tantalizing is the fact that the String Theory necessitates additional dimensions to function. It's been suggested that there are 10, 11 dimensions. For me, anything more than 4 dimensions (length, width, height and time) is beyond my comprehension by my feeble brain, yet that notion of other dimensions and multiverse is so "far out".
The Outer Limits lived on for another day.
I might be misrepresenting or conflating about topics that I am not an expert in, but the reason that I am geeking out is that I find the topic so mystical and inspirational that I want to do a painting about "strings".
I painted the "strings" using some cheap gold acrylic hobby paint. I picked the roughest and stiffest brush I could find and I painted on gold speckled Xuan. The native gold speckles on the paper helped to set the stage of my cosmic background.
With that, I randomly tapped on the paper. Then I found the footprint of that brush to be a bit too big and not wriggly enough for my "strings". I found a very skinny brush, one with just a few bristles and that worked out nicely. The long thin bristles were flexible and twisted and turned freely facilitating a more string-like line.
The next step in my snake painting was to render the markings of the snake. These markings are visual clues to trick our mind into thinking that this is indeed a snake that we are looking at. If the markings are done correctly and are distinct enough, perhaps we can even identify the species of the snake. The grid that I sketched in before assisted me to write in the array of scales in their proper orientations and gave my painting a degree of realism.
Before applying color to the sketched snake, I needed to establish the light values. I was taught this while learning how to do landscape in Chinese brush and it served me well over the years. Light values help to define the medial and lateral sides of the snake, to borrow from medical terminology. These values also help to locate the light source, thus giving a three dimensional interpretation visually. The values were applied using a light wash, and then rubbing with the semi-dried belly of the brush to help with the texture.
I could now color the body of the snake. Tea was my favorite color to use for this purpose. Mixing it with vermillion gave me the right hue and the opacity from a little mineral green helped to give off the subtle feel of snake skin. I also dolled up my snake using little dabs of metallic gold acrylic color. Camouflaging is the art of survival in nature, but for my painting I needed to snake to parade itself a bit more. The paper itself had built in gold specks in it, so the additional gold did not seem to distract.
Now that I had my shadow painted in, and it did seem to lift the snake off the paper, I needed to write something auspicious on that piece of red paper.
It wasn't that long ago that I was fretting about painting the dragon. I just couldn't form an image of what a dragon should look like in my head. Now it is almost time for its successor to emerge. The year of the snake is imminent.
I know a couple whose zodiac signs are dragon and snake. Dragon is traditionally held at the highest regard. Ancient emperors donned robes embroidered with magnificent dragons and these emperors held an absolute monopoly to the rights of anything that had to do with the dragon. The emperors claimed to embrace the virtues of the dragon, being kind and just on one hand but fierce and ruthless on the other. As for the snake, I suppose most cultures do not treat the snake with any fondness, which is unfortunate. It is interesting none the less, to find the snake as a symbol of healing, both in biblical terms and in Greek mythology. It is therefore employed as an emblem in the medical and pharmaceutical arena. Thus this couple would always banter with each other, but wittingly agree that they are both serpents and the true difference lies in whether one has legs or not.
Painting an animal that is associated with being sneaky, like a snake in the grass; or being evil like snake-eyes is difficult. Very difficult. Especially if the painting is to be used as good omen for the rest of the year. I don't want to paint puny grass snakes. They are not majestic symbols for me. I don't want to paint a constrictor snake, they seem sneaky and sinister. The King cobra is fierce alright, but that is all I can see. Always angry and combative. Not a virtue to embrace.
I've tried playing around with snake painting years ago. That never evolved into anything. It was done on photo paper and purely for fun.
As I am ready to dust off the cobweb on my Auld Lang Syne 45, I couldn't help but to reminisce about a few of my works, the ones that I have a special attachment to. I am adding a digital frame to them. Sort of donning them up in nice Sunday clothes.
Just maybe