Thursday Painting Class

One for the teacher:

Magnolia

And one for me:

Little Landscape

The magnolia has a seal on it because I "turned it in" as an assignment.  I never would have chosen to paint it myself.  When I finished the floral exercise, I did a quick little ink landscape out of my own head and through my mountain horse brush, but the teacher pretty much ignored it.

I was happy when I got home to find in the mail an album of paintings by Shen Zhou, a Ming Dynasty painter whose work I admire and which I actually copied some of a while back.

My Shen Zhou Copy #1

My Shen Zhou Copy  #2

I was working from a tiny print in a little illustrated volume of the Tao Te Ching, more interesting for the pictures than the translation, unless you really like James Legge's version; I can never decide whether to shelve it with my art books or with my other Tao Te Chings. (Or maybe it's not the source of my models; now that I look at it, I don't see these paintings in it, but there is an awful lot of other nice inspirational art reproduced therein. It would be a very nice gift for a Tao-inclined or Sinophiliac friend.) The Shen Zhou album, direct from Beijing, is a much larger format so I can study the brush strokes more closely.

Funny...my new teacher has admonished me not to copy (a completely proper tradition in learning brush painting)...except when it's her paintings.  The magnolia is based--albeit somewhat loosely--on one of hers.

The Mountains are High

...and the emperor is far away.

Another class doing brush work that isn't exactly my style, but trying to work nice with my new teacher, a very kind and serious Korean nun.  Before she arrived in the studio, I was attempting a copy of a painting by Wu Zuoren, a 20th-century Chinese painter, trained in classical western watercolor and oil techniques in Europe in the '20s and '30s, but who returned to traditional Chinese styles.  He is well known for his paintings of camels and yaks, not common objects of (or subjects in?) brush painting, but he was attracted to them after spending time in Mongolia and Xinjiang. I love these. I own two paintings of WZ-style camels -- I assume they are copies.  One is very bad, I bought it on eBay from a seller in Shanghai, I could have done it; but the other, acquired at a silent auction at a local Chinese culture event,  is pretty good.  Perhaps I have a hidden genuine gem in my collection.

Genuine Wu Zuoren or copy? Nimen zhidao ma?

I was about to try to approximate the brush strokes of a couple of Wu Zuoren's eagles flying over an abstract landscape when my teacher arrived.  She didn't smack my fingers with her brush, but she did tell me to put the book away, and not to copy.  (Never mind that copying masters is a traditional Chinese training technique.)  "You can do that at home, but not here.  I want you to develop your own style. No copying."

So, based on her textbook (not the Mustard Seed Garden Manual, or any of the other fine Chinese landscape guides I have), I produced some rocks, below, choosing my own washes, but deferring to her technique for depicting water.

Rocks and Water

She seemed satisfied and then said, "Now paint this."  Copy this?  I wasn't sure what "this" was, apart from some abstract mountains in the background.   There were no brush strokes I could identify to mimic, like in Wu Zuoren's paintings,  and it occurs to me now that it looked more like a Willem de Kooning piece than a traditional brush painting.

Teacher's Landscape

Since she had advised me not to copy, I decided to interpret what I thought I saw in my own way, also with reference to her own textbook.  My piece includes a funny little guy entering from the left, a fisherman developed to cover an unfortunate ink blot left by a careless brush:

My Interpretation

I felt very humble and bad, really, as she occasionally hovered behind me and I was pretty much ignoring everything in her painting.  I turned my finished piece in as a class assignment, and then mentioned to her that I was enjoying a Korean drama, Painter of the Wind, very very loosely based on the lives of the 18th century Korean artists, Kim Hong-do and Shin Yun-bok.  (Regarding this, see Tao 61 Yin post.)

"Ah, Kim Hong-do," she said.  "So you are interested in this history...you have background.  How long have you been studying?"  I told her about my experiences over the past three years with a traditional Chinese bird and flower painter and visiting Chinese museums and studying the history of that tradition.  

Then she photographed me with my interpretation of her painting.  Perhaps I'll turn up on her blog as a troublesome student.

Pesky student.  Wu Zuoren copy? Zhidao ma? Lousy paper!

Landscape Mode

Although nothing really compares with the landscape view at the top of my blog, or any of the other several thousand images of China, Florida, Oregon, Hawaii in my digital photo library, it is relaxing to play god with my mountain horse (shan ma) brush and ink.  Several recent images emerged from the brush during my new painting class.  Not what the teacher was really trying to get me to do, but enough already with the plum blossoms and orchids.

Happy Rocks

Misty Bridge

Raining in the Mountain

Blank Canvas

Washing Away Summer on Maui

Woke up groggy today, probably a side effect of the sense that summer is over, at least the series of events that started last March or April--a moved office, a new job, Beijing, Washington, Portland, and this weekend, Maui.

My reading from 365 Tao today seemed precise and profound:
An ocean of ink in a single drop
Trembling at the tip of my brush
Poised above stark white paper
A universe waits for existence.
"...A painter poises above blank paper. But it is not the painting to come that is as important as that single moment when all things still lie in a state of potential," Deng Ming-dao writes. "Will something ugly or beautiful be created? The stately determination to make something worthy of the materials and the moment is reverence."

There was a lot of potential in my summer, all that travel and new possibilities. With my recent visit to the next island over, I concluded something and now feel on the verge of the next roller coaster that will build up speed until the New Year.

"Only when we tire of our excesses can there be esteem," Deng continues.  That describes how I felt on awakening this morning.

So much potential in a drop of ink. My new painting class is good, but challenging, because the style and techniques seem not as traditional as my previous teacher's. (Well, not strictly true. I was immediately moved to an advanced level; most of the rest of the students are painting grass orchids, and have been for three weeks. Fortunately I have escaped that boring exercise.) It's all rooted in the "oriental" method, but with different (Japanese) paper, different (Japanese) brushes, different (Japanese) colors. The ink is the same, but I cheat: I surreptitiously grind my ink stick in bottled ink, a quick trick I learned from my Chinese teacher. I feel my old teacher's admonitions and instructions. I think she would say what I am doing is ugly. But, she's not there, and I actually kinda liked the image I made last night (regrettably I had to "turn it in" for class, and I failed to photograph the landscape of somewhat garishly colored trees, mountains, and rocks.) The beholder I suppose determines if it is ugly or beautiful; the painter simply creates a universe. Maybe a Japanese universe. Or Korean--my new teacher is a Korean nun. She is quite kind and patient; I don't expect her to smack my fingers with a brush handle.

I realize other students are not necessarily in the class for the same reason I am; they are undergraduates fulfilling some requirement. I am there to paint, and increase my skill and knowledge. I did not expect challenges to my already acquired method. But I find some wisdom in The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, a classic Chinese text from the 17th century:
"To be without method is deplorable, but to depend entirely on method is worse. ... If you aim to dispense with method, learn method. If you aim at facility, work hard. If you aim for simplicity, master complexity."

And if you didn't think there is Tao in Chinese painting, there it is. 

One of the things that all this painting exercise has done for me, perhaps the real point, is to cause me to look at real things a little differently.  I notice the structure of trees more, the beauty of a flower, the mist on a mountain, a carp in the koi pond.  And at the same time, I look at classic paintings and enter them. They are the original virtual reality. Photos become inspirations for paintings.  Like this fish, a denizen of a koi pond on Maui.

Happy Fish

But I won't paint that fish.  Or even a fish.  The aim is simply to paint fish.

____________

NOTE:  Not sure if this post is going to publish correctly; I have been having a little struggle session with Windows 7, which seems to exxhibit some quirks regarding my habitual blogging method.  Taoists are supposed to cope with change, but not sure that patience with operating systems is what is intended.  Those are methods you do come to depend on; why not, when they work?  One time when I hate change!

A Brush with Ambivalence

I've been spending some quiet time recently on my lanai studio with my brushes and ink, and studying some Chinese painting manuals. I picked up a couple of interesting volumes in a bookshop in the Beijing airport on my way home last month: very fine "How To" manuals of landscape, and bird and flower painting, the two major genres in Chinese painting, along with figure painting, which I don't do or have much interest in other than looking at. Although, one of my favorite paintings, the figure of a herbalist, at right, probably a copy of some classic, hangs in the window in a Chinese pharmacy in Chinatown, and I own a similar scroll of a literati guy with some ducks. But the style I am most attracted to is shan shui (mountain and water) landscape. My teacher is bird and flower painter, but she is tolerant of my interest and more than proficient to teach the techniques of landscape.

Though a teacher is essential, manuals are an interesting element in Chinese culture studies. Wuxia stories often involve the search for some esoteric lost martial arts manual that has the final secret to some ultimate power. Likewise painting manuals describe technique and offer background into the philosophy and techniques, very interesting once one has had the foundational guidance of a teacher. Similarly qigong videos and books are useful and informative to someone once they have been initiated into the basic techniques. You can't reliably learn these any of things just from a book, but once you have been taught, the books are of value.

In this frame of mind, I scrolled through an article in the New Yorker about the purchase of a painting we all surely know (if you studied English literature in high school--I thought the artwork was called "Thanantopsis"; it always illustrated the poem) and its recent destination in a new art gallery in Arkansas. Kindred Spirits, to which I alluded in reference to my own painting exercise not so long ago, was acquired in 2005 for some $35 million by Alice Walton, the middle daughter of Sam Walton (as in Wal-Mart, not that depression-era TV series), and something like the second or third wealthiest woman in the world. She's been buying lot of American art (not infrequently by cell phone while riding a horse) to display in a museum in her home town in Arkansas which boasts a bigger endowment than the Whitney. The dynasty's outlet --or at least its related philanthropic foundation --where I got a photo for my last Chinese visa is financing a major collection of American art. She is apparently not a shabby collector, but it is something of an affront--or surprise-- to the art establishment that her acquisitions will find a home in an obscure town in the Ozarks, as an economic boon to a heartland community.

Justifying her purchase of Kindred Spirits, she said of the previous owner, "They needed the money." I'd be glad to have her give me $350...even $35...for my little "kindred spirits" echo. Why not? It's in the Chinese style, but by an American. Sort of a reverse Wal-Mart tradition.

My Own Private China

When I wasn't watching "The Herbalist's Manual" yesterday, I spent some time quarantined with my brushes and ink.