Tag: flower painting

Chinese Painting Class, 23 May 2009 – ii

A week ago, our Chinese painting class met, as it does, once a month. This month’s subject is officially the peony, but we moved into something else….that story shall follow. Let us stay on track, though!

The Peony

The peony is an incredible flower, long held in esteem in many cultures for its beauty.  In general, it prefers a cooler winter than we have in California, but one of my classmates mentions having success locally.  Beautiful photos of the flower make you want to grow some!

The Teacher

Mr. Ha – whom we frequently call “Teacher” – or Harris – arrives from some distance by 9:30 a.m., to our classroom in Oak Park.

The Class

We drift in. Paulina has supplies if we need some. Classmates pick the subjects to paint (such as the peony for this month), or ask Teacher to do a painting or calligraphy demonstration.

As I mentioned in the earlier post in this series, it is traditional in Chinese and Japanese schools to copy a painting to learn how it was done. This means looking at the painting closely, and analyzing it. For myself, this is really difficult – I don’t consider analysis part of painting. But, with analysis, comes practice, and from practice comes skill, and finally mastery of the subject. The work develops the mind, the hand, the kinesthetic memory, and from this can flow a spontaneous painting which is simple in content, yet masterful in execution. It is worth the effort.

The Books

Publishers are always producing new “how to” books about watercolor techniques, or impasto, or drawing, or whatever. Asian publishers are not any different, though for some strange reason, they tend to publish a lot of books about Chinese or Japanese painting. These books cover traditional subjects, such as the peony, and often have an entire book devoted to one subject. Step-by-step, a final painting is demonstrated. How to load the brush, and which colors to use in this process are shown. Brush stroke direction is indicated, or sequence.

The painting originally chosen for this session was quite complex, with peonies in many different colors; you can see the painting to the right, or for a larger one, here.

Teacher chose a simpler one for class demonstration, which I think was far more effective than the original because it is less overwhelming. What needs to be remembered is that we are watching Teacher as he paints. This means we need to observe his brushwork – how he maneuvers the brush on the paper, what colors he chooses, and how he loads his brush. As students, we can practice from Teacher’s demonstration, and then move on to copying a more complex painting when alone in the studio.

Painting the Real World

One of the beauties of painting is it can be photographic in detail, or suggestive, allowing the mind and imagination to fill in the spaces. Personally, I prefer the latter. I’ve never been a realist, yet as someone who enjoys painting, I love seeing what the “real” is, and seeing the work of the “artist.”

This is a strange orchid. It lives in a pot out on the patio, grows several feet tall, and survives my neglect. I have seen this same orchid flourishing in more protected areas, lanky and straggly, in pinks, oranges and reds. Can you believe that this flower is about 5 feet tall? It really is!

The flowers themselves are rather tiny, but clustered in groups at the top of long stems. Air roots emerge periodically from the stems, and if you want more of these orchids, cut them down, stick ’em in the ground or potting soil, and off they go.

These orchids make me laugh. I just don’t expect orchids to be quite so hardy! I always think of delicate flowers, in steamy hot houses, sort of like the descriptions in that old story by Dashiell Hammett – decay, rot, humidity.

These orchids are really not elegant in the way cymbidiums are, or other more exotic specimens. Their beauty lies in the smallness of the flower, the gangliness of the stalks, the sturdy jutting of the leaves.

Here is my homage to this unnamed orchid.

Line & Color, v

PINK

With the basic foundations of warm and cold greens laid down, time to paint the flowers. Pink seems to be more summery to me, so pink it will be! I will be using a total of three pinks. The foundation pink is neither too blue nor too red, and so will be the underpainting for the warm and cold pink to be applied later. This picture shows several layers of the same pink – the darker the pink, the more layers of color. The palest areas are single color layers. The medium pinks are two to three layers of color. The darkest have up to six.

The detailed picture will give you a better idea of some of the subtle differences of one, two, or more layers. The smaller flowers have only one to two color layers – see the slight changes in color density?

Line & Color, i

Today, I am just writing off the top of my head.

I have been working on a handmade paper, experimenting with it as far as color, line, and ability to withstand wetness in the form of washes and in the form of repeated layers of color.

So . . . the next picture was a free-hand outlining of chrysanthemums, trying to create lined areas with logical beginnings and ends, and then painted with the saiboku. I think the results are much better. Remember the coloring books of your childhood? Staying inside the lines was “good” – and actually, with “meticulous” painting, staying in the lines is “good” too!  And, it was fairly easy to do. I filled the lines in with mixtures of colors, in one layer, except for a couple of small areas where you will see areas of orange in the green of the leaves. I recalled, last minute, something I read about applying multiple thin layers of colors, to gain a translucency not possible with a single layer of paint. Thus, I dabbed in a bit of orange, while the paper and paint had not yet dried. I like the results.

And this leads to today’s doings, which I hope to photograph along the way. It may be done today, but as the day is dampish, and other things are going, it may be a project of some duration.

To begin, I return to the chrysanthemums. Ink ground, I did the outlines, some with darker ink, some with lighter ink. What I plan to do is to do thin layers of paint, and then photograph the picture before beginning the next layer of painting. Never having done this before, I will be looking to some texts, such as Fritz van Briessen’s The Way of the Brush: Painting Techniques of China and Japan. Others will be mentioned as used.