The Master-Student Cycle

When does a student become a master? When does the master need a student? An apprentice?  A disciple?

I've been having a little crisis of ...something... lately, thinking about teaching and learning.   I have been variously absorbed in my brush painting class, Teaching Company commuting lectures, sitting in on a class about Chinese thought and Taoism, and working on a project that involves mentoring of promising students to help them get doctoral degrees.  A certain studiousness has rubbed off on me as a result of my new job in an academic environment.  There is a library just across the road from my office!

What is the differnce between a master (shifu) and a teacher (laoshi)? All masters and teachers surely have a perspective, but perhaps the really good ones leave their personal perspective somewhat hidden? Or not? (Like the Mormon who did just a really superb job on the "Great Minds of the East" Teaching Company course. This is not to be construed as any kind of comment about Mitt Romney.)  Maybe it depends on the level of students and their needs and desires?  A master should not take on a student that is more advanced, or more correctly said, on a different path?  The student should know how to pick the master that's right for him at the time? At what point do the master and student become colleagues, sharing their own perspectives, supporting each other?  All masters are still students?  What does the master learn from the student?  What is mentoring?  Why am I writing all these thoughts as questions?

In the end, one is always a student, trying to master oneself.

After I once again didn't quite copy my painting teacher's example, but brought the assignment forth according to my own taste and previous training, she said, "You know a lot about Chinese painting.  Maybe you don't need a teacher."

Self-teaching does pay off.  Earlier today a Chinese colleague was telling me about a terrible hit-and-run incident involving a Chinese toddler.  "Where?" I asked. "Oh, I don't know, I can only say it in Chinese," he said. "Try me," I said.  "Foshan, near Guangdong."  "Ah, home of wing chun!"  "You know that?"  Yep.  (I watch, and listen carefully to, a lot of martial arts movies.)  He went on to suggest that perhaps people are better in the countryside. "They still have heart."  Sadly, while looking for these links, I discover the child has died about half an hour ago.

"How to Paint
Lifelike Camel"

I know something about Chinese painting, but not a lot, and I still learn...maybe not the precise lessons on offer, but something that justifies the time spent in the studio (which may be more practice than actual learning).   I have come to understand that my teacher is not quite presenting traditional techniques, and her own style is a modern mix of west and east, and not just China, but Japan (the terminally cute brightly colored part) and Korea (the less Chinese part) too.  I showed her the lesson book (at right) I just got from Shandong, instructions and tips on how to paint camels (loutou). Amazing what you can find on eBay. Since I can't read the tips, presented in Chinese with no helpful subtitles, I was hoping she might demonstrate the brush strokes, the direction, the ink loading.

"You can do that at home," she said. I don't know whether she meant I should do that only at home, or that I was competent to do it on my own at home.  She glanced sideways at my chrysanthemums, and said, "I am teaching basics here, so they (the undergraduates taking the class for credit) can do their own art."

I am a disciple without a master.  Here are my chrysanthemums, symbols of autumn, longevity, and a life spent in quiet retirement.  I wish.

Chrysanthemums: Autumn Symbol 

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!

Mountaineering

Engineering mountains (mountaineering?) in painting class...my heart is in the mountains.  I feel like Slartibartfast making his fjords.

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

White Walls, White Gloves

How lovely it is to read an old book, well, maybe not that old really, but a letter-press first edition of New Yorker commentaries from the 1950s.  Christopher Rand's A Nostalgia for Camels, an interesting Alibris score, has been on my "to-read" pile for months.  Who knows why you pick up a book and it resonates when it does. There are plenty of books that I pick up and then put down because the timing and mood just isn't right.  I want to read them, and I believe I will, but it's just not the moment.  Then, some time later, it's THE book to read.

A Nostalgia for Camels is a collection of some pieces this old China Hand wrote from his observations in Asia from the very late '40s through the '50s.  I am struck halfway through by a piece about architecture in Chandigarh, when Corbusier, a prominent modernist form-follows-function Swiss-French architect of the period, was designing buildings for the capitol of this new city in the Punjab in the '50s.  (One of my readers will appreciate that Corbusier's name was not really Corbusier,  but a nom de plume which, according to Rand, means "The Crow.")

Corbusier was implementing some interesting human/ecological elements into his design for the High Court building, utilizing poured concrete and gunite.  But Rand also mentions the living quarters of  the laborers who worked on the modern structure.  They were built of cheap brick,"a rich, warm red, rather brownish, and give a substantial look. Often they are set off by trim of white-painted plaster, which adds a smart touch like that of white-walled tires or white gloves."

When was the last time you saw a car with white walls or a woman wearing white gloves (and not on Mad Men)?  Or even a hotel concierge? I grew up in white-walled, white-gloved America.  And I played with Lincoln Logs (as did my son) and American Bricks (which had white lintels for the window construction).  I had a friend who lived in a house that looked like it was built from American Bricks, although my own home was a white-painted, lap-sided "Lincoln Homes" plan, the construction of which was directed by my father who did a lot of the work himself, though he called in specialists to do the plastering of walls, laying of plumbing, and stone masonry for the fireplace and flue.  (The gray slump brick was later whitewashed.)

I read Rand's lovely book, an artifact of pre-digital publishing (not sure it would feel so sweet as a Kindle version) and think of the white walls and white gloves.  Things don't really change.  Now kids play with the more abstract Lego bricks, and white walls have given way to weird wheel rims; naked female hands sport manicures with tiny elaborate artwork, sometimes bejeweled.  The smart touches of the new millennium.

All is change, but nothing really changes, does it?

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!