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.
Flower Petals, Flower Stems, and “Dotting the Heart”
Petals & Stems
According to The Mustard Seed Garden, each flower should have five petals. The smaller, narrow petals curl and the larger ones are broad and straight. Stamens are indicated by dark dots of ink. When the flowers face the viewer, the dark dots are in the center. When the flower is viewed from the back, the stamens are seen on either side of the middle petal. When stamens are on the side, the flower is being viewed from the side.
As illustrated above, the flowers are in different positions – facing toward you, away from you, as well as to the side. In addition to different positions, the flowers are also seen in different degrees of development, from new flowers to older ones more fully opened.
Painting the orchid petals is a lot more difficult than it looks! A written description is not the best, but let me try:
Hold the brush upright,filled with light to medium ink.
If starting at the center of the flower, start with very gentle pressure, and then increase it slowly as you curve the brush a little, to curve the petal. Near the end of the petal, raise the brush up, and back over the petal you have just painted.
If starting at the the end of the petal and moving toward the heart of the flower, begin with pressing down and then curving toward the center, raising the brush as you move until the tip glides up off the paper in a gentle arc. You may want to retreat a little over the narrow part as you lift your brush.
Painting the stems is rather like dancing the waltz – a dip, a sway. If you look at the picture above, you will see that the stems have a bit of a bulge at either end. This is done with an upright brush put straight down on the paper, a little pause before moving it, and then a slight pause with light pressure at the end before lifting the brush from the paper. Do it to the beat of a waltz – a one, two, and a three – or to the equivalent of ONE (push brush down) two (pause and begin lifting brush and moving toward the end of the stem) THREE (push down, and lift, retreating over the painted area).
The fact is, describing how to use a brush for sumi-e is difficult. The only way to do it. If you have never taken a class where you can watch the instructor, the next best thing can be a video. There are a lot of good videos on You Tube and elsewhere on the net. Here are a few that came up when I put in “orchid painting” on Google, and chose video.
In particular, this one is good for how to paint the flowers themselves:
The painter is listed in YouTube as “yanghaiying” if you care to do a search for her.
Dotting the Heart
To “dot the heart” of the orchid is to bring the flower to bloom. To do this, dark ink is used. A brush that is relatively dry is also best, as then the ink will not bleed into the brush’s bristles nor onto the paper. Waiting until the petals have dried also helps.
To create the stroke, I begin with the brush upright, push the tip down gently, and then curve and lift the bush up at the same time. Observe some videos to see how the artist moves the brush – and watch it over and over to observe the movement of the artist, how the brush bristles are manipulated, how the brush is turned. Be patient – that little flick! is tricky! Once you accomplish that, you will be able to create some incredibly beautiful dots.
As can be seen in the above picture, there are all kinds of dots. Some begin with downward pressure, rise and push down again. Others are a dot, with a flick and a turn. Some curve, some are straighter, some are dots which are curvy – pressure and a turn – before the brush is slowly lifted up from the paper and turned as it leaves.
Just remember – it takes practice. People don’t “just paint”! Practicing all these little steps, leaves, petals, dots, and lines will give you the skill, knowledge and dexterity to create a seemingly simple painting.
Putting all these steps together will give you a lovely orchid!
“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.
There is something so inherently interesting about lines. Outlines. Lines of color. Lines leading into the distance. Lines of a car. Lines of a leaf. Ink lines. Paint lines. The swoop of telephone lines alongside the road.
A brush can express a line, which in turn, expresses something else. A line can be straight. A line can curve. A line can undulate. A line can be created without a change of pressure on the brush, or changing the angle of the brush. Or, it can be created with movement and pressure.
Lines can be used to enhance the sense of something, such as the veins in a leaf. Or give a subtle – and not so subtle – sense of a shape, by outlining it.
Coloring books have lines, too, and good kids stay inside the lines, and are tidy.
Lines can say many things. Yet, a part of me rebels against lines. “The shortest distance between two points is a line.” Is it?
Lines can contain. Lines delineate. Lines define.
Lines express. Lines move beyond the seen, on into infinity, leading the imagination to the unknown, leaving the mind to fill in what is expressed – the experience becomes unique to the person, the imagined is more real than that which is seen.
Lines can be broken. Lines can be solid. Lines can be heavy or light or medium in density, or gradated by the addition of color or more ink.
Any brush stroke, long or short, is a line. What is on that brush becomes an experience on paper, the process of loading ink or paint, choosing the angle of the brush, the tip, the pressure. Paper determines if the paint or ink runs and bleeds, or sits on the surface to be slowly absorbed by the fibers. Is the paper sized? Unsized? Has it been moistened or not?
In Western painting, white space is often something to fill up. The closest I can think of in Western painting where white space is used as a part of a picture is vignetting.
Vignetting occurs when a painting blurs towards its edges, creating a shape inside a border of white or another color. The white space encases the central object of the picture in an oval or round shape, acting as a frame to the picture itself. This is a conscious use of white space by the painter to frame a picture – it contains the picture, but does not interact with the painting itself.
When French painters of the 19th century became aware of the compositional elements in Japanese prints it was quite an eye-opener. Parts of a picture were suggested rather than seen – the imagination was used to fill in beyond the edges. Thus, in this same context, a piece of white paper has the potential for so much more than being filled in!
In her book Japanese Calligraphy: The Art of Line & Space, Christine Flint Sato writes “The calligrapher, facing the blank white page before beginning to write, does not ponder how to fill it, but how best to activate it” (p. 55). This suggests a dynamic relationship between artist or calligrapher with the white space – the white space is vital and alive, an element with its own life, its own potential, its own heartbeat and breath.
How then does the artist approach this white space? In ink painting, or in calligraphy, white can show through breaks in the ink as it is laid down – but the relationship with the remaining white continues. How the artist or calligrapher proceeds can energize the white, creating an exciting and active alliance between ink and blank paper – or kill it dead. Sato refers to this dead white as kukyo, meaning “emptiness” (p. 61). You can see Ms. Sato’s work, and some details of this book, at http://sumiwork.com/
Many books dedicated to the art of sumi-e write about its immediacy, but in practicing the art of sumi-e, I have found that I must practice to create that immediacy. This means knowing how wet my brush needs to be, how thick the ink, where I want to paint, where I do not want to paint. Japanese calligraphers, according to Sato, practice and repeat until they can produce a spontaneous – but a controlled spontaneity – calligraphic artwork.
Ink painting, as with all arts, requires practice and experience, and a willingness to “just do it”! In “doing it” skill is gained, and the mastery of the brush, the ink, the paper, the white space, give the artist a language of experience that allows, at last, that expression of self to flow so easily . . . practice those bamboo leaves every day!
Ink, Yarn & Beer 