sumi – Page 9 – Ink, Yarn & Beer

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.

Adaptations of West & East

These past few weeks I have gone through some of my past paintings. One of the things I have been trying to figure out are ways in which it may be possible to create a certain spontaneous, zen, sumi-quality in a painting done using western materials.

The absorbent paper, and other papers of Japan, China, and Korea are not readily available in the United States. Mounting the very thin, Asian papers is a challenge. Traditional methods of wheat paste are difficult, and until the method is perfected, the artist can lose a lot of work if not careful. In Japan and China, there are shops to do the mounting for you – not so here. Other methods for mounting include using a framer, but the framer may not be able to get rid of the wrinkles for you. Dry mounting, using silicone release paper, such as used in photography mounting, may work, but even that can be risky – the wrinkles may still be there, or the adhesive may catch another part of the painting if you are not careful.

Western watercolor paper comes in rough, cold press, and hot press. Yupo is a Japanese synthetic paper, but sumi ink and gansai rinse away under running water. Thus, it seems, that the ideal is to somehow re-create the absorbent quality as best as possible using western papers.

The quality of xuan and tissue-thin sulfite papers is one of both absorbency and ability to portray each brush stroke. These are the ideal papers for sumi ink and sumi-e. Dry brush is easy enough on western paper. But that absorbency? How to achieve that?

Keeping the paper damp, so the color or ink is drawn into the paper fibers is critical. I don’t want the paper so wet that everything bleeds, but damp enough so the character of the ink or paint is caught. This is so hard to describe!

bamboo

This painting of bamboo is done on Fabriano 100% Cotton Cold Press paper. First, it was masked off with drafting tape onto a board, and then a layer of water was lightly brushed over the surface, and then a pale wash of lemon yellow added.

As in traditional sumi-e, the idea was to paint without outline, and to create a focused, yet spontaneous, painting. The shape of the bamboo stalks was considered, and painted without the drawing of outlines. The brush was pushed onto the paper, or paused in areas. I touched the paper to assess its dryness or dampness, and waited for more drying to occur, or added water as needed. To get the color gradations, I loaded my brush with pale-medium-dark paint, but at times I helped it along by adding color on the edges of the stems, or lifting as necessary. The result seems to have been successful.

With Arches 140# Hot Press paper, the technique is similar, but the smaller the sheet (as in the small size for ACEOs), it becomes apparent that the paper can warp more easily the wetter it becomes. Weighting down the finished product seems to help, and so does ironing!

These next pictures were done on ACEO-sized Arches. For the maple leaves, the background was given a very light wash of yellow, and then, as you can see, a wet-into-wet technique done with the branch on the far right. It has a very soft effect. The lighter leaves were painted first and allowed to become nearly dry before the darker leaves were added. Brush movement of pushing down, or turning and lifting, were done to create the shapes of the leaves as well as for the tiny maple seeds. Overall, fairly successful.

maple tree

The plum tree below is also done on an ACEO-sized sheet of Arches 140# Hot Press. Here, the effort to utilize the damp paper succeeded to a degree. I did load my brush with successive levels of ink, light to dark, but I did not succeed in its showing up. Perhaps the paper needed to be a bit dryer than it was, as the ink shades all blurred to create one shade. Still, the final result was not too bad.

I think that with more practice I might be able to achieve the effects I want, but it will take analysis and experience. In the meantime, I am trying – still! – to master the mounting of xuan with silicone release paper. But, to tell the truth, I rather doubt I have the patience for it.

Water Birds

Water birds – wading, fishing birds – are a common theme in many Asian paintings. These include cranes, herons, egrets. There is something incredibly beautiful and fierce about these birds.

Seeing these birds is an incredible experience. When I was a student at UC Santa Barbara, my dormitory looked out over the lagoon. Great Blue Herons nested in the eucalyptus trees. One day, an escaped pink flamingo began living in the water! Hiking in the Matilija Creek area of Ventura County, I sat down and suddenly, within inches of my head, whoosh! – out flies a heron! Egrets wade in the marshy areas of local rivers.

Imagine yourself as one of these birds. Suddenly, your legs bend forward at the knee, not backward. You don’t have hands. You have long, wide wings, with feathers rippling out from the sides of your body as you bring them forward. Your nose is now long, longer, longer . . . how long is a bill? Is it a bill or a beak? And your nose is also your mouth – snap! A fish, a frog for dinner. And then, there is your neck. Long and undulating, suddenly your head is able to turn to look behind you, it goes up and down a long distance (certainly longer than mine!). And eyes on either side of your head, not looking out in front of you. How does it affect your vision? Lack of depth but awareness of movement?

Take a walk in your new bird body . . . feel how your shoulders hunch, how your wings expand, how you walk in the water . . . expand the crest on your head, fluff your feathers . . . launch yourself into the sky like a rocket, stand still and then, faster than can be seen, snatch your fish from the creek. How do your claws feel as they dangle when you walk, when you come in to land, when you launch from your nest in the reeds? What do you see around you? Leafy trees, swamp grasses, other birds. What do you hear? Rain on water? Wind in the trees? What do you feel when the wind rustles your feathers or rain pours off your back?

Photos are incredible resources for studying birds. There are many public domain sites from which photos can be copied. The snowy egret above came from the digital library system of the US Fish & Game site: http://images.fws.gov/. Take a look . . . imagine . . . think about how your brush can create a feather, catch a movement. What shades of grey? White? Ink only?

Line & Color, vii

The Final Pictures

The final decision was to attempt to darken the middle flower and create more light / dark contrast. Don’t think it works. The other choice was to move from more warm at the base of the painting to cooler on top. Washes of yellows and yellowy-pinks went in, from bottom to top. Purple-blues were overlaid the very top flower.

To a degree, I think this warm-to-cool saves the painting, but the lost contrast in the middle flower weakens it as a whole. The contrasts between the red and green of the leaves helps, but doesn’t save it. The B&W below shows this quite clearly.