Tag: ink 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.

Chinese Painting Class, 23 May 2009 – i

Here where I live, there is a small group of painters who meet monthly for class with our instructor. This is the Chinese Brush Painting and Calligraphy Association of Thousand Oaks. Our instructor, Mr. Ha, is from China. He has trained in traditional Chinese and Western art traditions. Copying the works of other artists is a tradtional learning tool in both art traditions, but perhaps more so in the East. This means to learn by imitating and reproducing the work of others. Control of brush and stroke, elements of composition, and ways in which effects are produced are studied, analyzed, and executed. In Saturday’s class, we will watch Mr. Ha as he reproduces this painting, take notes, and learn from observation. At home, we do our work.

This is a tough process. Paper and ink and color are far more challenging than may be anticipated. As I have written in other posts, brushes from Asia are not the same as Western, and the paper certainly is not. The paper we use in class is usually fairly soft and unsized, and this absorbency gives brushwork its immediacy and spontaneous quality, but in just a second, a beautiful work can be destroyed by too much water in the brush. Watch out, grab your towel and blot!

This month’s painting is peonies. They symbolize riches and honor, good fortune, and prosperity.

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.

The Moon in Ink Painting

In most western paintings, the moon is painted full, large and overwhelming.  In Japanese scrolls, the moon is shown in all its phases.  Waxing.  Waning.  Gibbous.  Full.  Crescent.  Quarter.  In fog.  Alone in the sky.  Through the trees.

The fact is, to paint the moon full is very simple!  Catching its other shapes and moods is not so easy.  I’ve tried to paint the moon over the years, attempting to catch a quality or mood in a few strokes. I’ll leave it to you to judge.

Fundamentals of Orchid Painting – Notes from The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, i

“In learning to write, one begins with simple characters made up of a few strokes and proceeds to complicated characters with several strokes. In the same way, in learning to paint flowers, one begins with those with few petals and proceeds to those with many petals, from small leaves to large, and from single stems to bunches. Each division of subject matter is classified here so that beginners may learn them thoroughly, not only beholding them with their eyes but retaining the impressions in their minds.” (p. 323, Sze, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, 1963 The Bollingen Foundation).

There is a long tradition in painting the orchid in Asian art, and, according to The Mustard Seed, the painting of the leaves is of primary importance as the entire painting of the orchid is dependent on the execution of the leaves.

Strokes to be learned are the “nail end” stroke, the “rat’s tail” stroke, and the “belly of the mantis.”

Compositional elements include “eye of the phoenix” and “breaking the eye of the elephant.” Additionally, there is a need to understand the growth pattern of the orchid so that one may express in a stroke or two the way in which leaves wrap around the base of the orchid, as well as how the leaves form a sheath for the roots.

Leaves should cross, overlap, bend, and raise, yet “never repeat in a monotonous manner” (p. 325). Correct portrayal of orchid leaves, to show distinction between varieties, is extremely important.

Most of us will easily paint leaves left to right, but of equal importance is being able to paint them as dexterously right to left. Observation of how a plant grows upward, downward, how leaves twist and turn is all vital to successful painting. Reality and the artistic aesthetic may conflict, but the spirit of the plant is the essential component.

To paint these leaves, load your brush with light, medium, and then tip with dark ink. Hold your brush upright, and then pretend you are a leaf blowing in the wind. Your arm flows with the breeze, up and down, sideways right and left. The leaf then is painted – narrow, fat, rising up to the sky, and down to touch the earth.

To me, that is perhaps the most difficult element of a painting – the spirit, or chi. And yet, when I finally begin to connect with a plant, and a painting, the painting comes alive before my eyes. I can feel the leaves as they move in the wind. I can smell the fragrance of the flower. More, I can feel the energy of the entire plant, and my imagination moves beyond my senses and merges with more than the plant, more than the world, more than my mind’s eye – there is an altogether other world where everything merges and becomes more real than reality.