Asian Ink Painting-Preparing Supplies

Carefully choosing and preparing one's supplies is both  critical and a ritual. Begin with good supplies. More than in any other medium good supplies will mean  the difference between a satisfying experience or one riddled with frustration. (This may be the case because so many truly poor materials are sold in this country and Asian Airports!)

If you do not have the opportunity to travel to the Far East to purchase your tools for this endeavor, then I strongly urge you to order from Oriental Art Supply in California. I, nor my students, have as yet ever gotten a poor brush or ink with too much binder.
Here is a beginning list of supplies:

Brush- Orchid Bamboo Medium is the brush with which I complete most of my paintings. Its wonderful well at the base holds a tremendous amount of liquid. The tip is true and fine.
Before using your brush make sure you
1. Remove the plastic cover AND THROW IT OUT
2. Prepare a cup of luke warm water and gradually move the brush around gently working out the sizing.
3. Repeat this at least two times more with fresh water. You can feel in the water is slimy from the sizing.
4. Let the brush air dry with the tip pointed down.

Ink stone- Get one with a lid especially if you have animals whose hair is ubiquitous!
Even though ink does not last and should not be used after it has stood for awhile, you might be called away from your work and a lid will keep moisture in and dust out.

Ink- I have found the student grade grinding ink has a beautiful bluish cast so I use it along with the professional grade ink.
Remember to NEVER leave your ink stick on the wet grinding stone. It can absorb moisture causing it to split. Also it can stick to the stone damaging the surface.

Paper- OAS sells a wonderful collection of papers. It might be hard to determine which one to purchase. I suggest you begin with the sampler pack with 8 different papers. Generally there are 3 types of papers. Glass has been treated with Alum and therefore is waterproof. This paper is used for fine line paintings since the moisture is not absorbed into the fibers of the paper. Single Suen and Double Suen papers are absorbent and there fore used for bleed painting. Single suen - my personal favorite, is harder to control moisture but nuance of brush work is better recorded. Double suen is a thicker paper requires more moisture in the brush and darks tend to be stronger.
White felt to paint on. The paper is so thin it will stick to hard surfaces and felt absorbs excess water.
White plates to mix values.

The literati of Japan and China believed the only true paintings were in black and white for the artist could not hide brush strokes as one can with color. Thus the mixing of values becomes critical. A good painting has at least 5 values.

 

 

Guided Risks

BK (before kids) oil was my medium of choice. When our middle child became seriously ill, ridding the house of toxins became a necessity so I switched to watercolors. They are also quick and visceral, asking to be painted in fleeting non overworked moments. It meant I could leave a painting out considering next steps between changing diapers and tramping behind little bodies through the mud and woods. When watercolor became "clicheish",  Asian ink made me consider the essence of objects depicted with a sweep and twist of a brush. Visceral and ethereal, it captured spirit. These techniques revitalized water's movement of pigment on the rag paper of western watercolor.
Our son, with the healing properties of homeopathy, survived his illness and grew 6 inches in a month. Pastel's re entered our home. Ah the colors of this medium the layering the sculpting can not be surpassed.
Now, years later, oil seems intriguing again-- the goopiness, the shadows cast by layered paint, the challenge of making non pasty looking lights. But so much is forgotten! I must be the scientist before I can be a painter.

When beginning with a new medium or revisiting an old friend, I must be the scientist. Laying out all colors of old carefully recording each name   until I can definitely tell which is which, playing with mixtures keeping track of warms and cools, which if added to what will make its neighbor sing.
It is hard taking time out from 'work' when one's work is on what one's family lives. But to NOT take the time out to play and be that scientist means taking the risk of repeating what has always worked. Guided risk taking has always been integral in my vision - in what I need to do as an artist (and mom like using homeopathy to replace damaging drugs). It is a discipline. But when knowledge becomes second nature, then comes the transcendence, the moment when the creation of art is more than the act, it is when the hand moves on its own in response to the senses.
PS By the bye- applying the charged brush technique of Asian Ink Painting to oil creates a perfect coloring for incremental  fluid shifts I do not think this human hand could do otherwise! Oh my goodness!!!!
PPS I wonder how a good Asian Brush would work in oils? Has anyone ever experimented with that?

Integration and Mask

These are two very different topics, but want to explore each.
This past week at my last on the road show, I had a fascinating talk with a fellow artist.  She also happens to be an high school chemist teacher. Our discussion began with the state of education in this country and as conversations do we wandered in and out of topics arriving at an exploration of the beauty of integration.  For years I have integrated math and music into my art (melody lines are a wonderful way to build eloquent designs math, especially geometry,  is fundamental to composition. My chemist art friend then explained to me how the first periodic tables for chemistry were based on the musical scale! As scientists discovered the properties of the substances of the earth they organized their learning rooting it in their knowledge of music!
I found this to be terribly exciting. And what is more, the natural properties the actual facts of the findings fit into the 8 note scale. Is there a pattern in nature or what? I have always thought nature is the most randomly organized system or most ordered chaos and as an artist it is my constant struggle/delight/ inquiry to find ways to produce marks more organic or orderly chaotic than my hand and eye can ever produce!

That being said, I have started to really play with mask in these attempts. I have tended to avoid mask with watercolor painting because it is so stiff and hard edged. No matter how much rubbing and attempted bleeding there is always 'proof' that mask had been used. But through play, I have found some fun ways to manipulate mask to produce some interesting effects.
Here are some things to try
#1. Mask some shapes and when dry do a wash. Before the wash is dry try lifting the mask. This will soften edges and make less of a separate carved out look.

#2. Buy some drawing gum made by Pebeo. This is very liquid mask so it runs. Mask some areas then get a very fine nibbed squirt bottle. Set the nib in the puddle of wet mask and force air out. This creates a very find misted edge.

#3. Using the same Pebeo mask, put a little in fine nibbed bottle ( like the ones which come with Masquepen) blow the mask onto the paper. This produces a fine spray .

#4. Do a mask design on your paper. Once it is dry, paint a very liquid rich wash. Tip your paper this way and that letting the paint follow the outlines of the mask. (This is not dissimilar to trying to get those little silver balls through a maze) Look at the patterns the paint makes around the mask by how it collects in certain places.

These are all just gimmicks of course. The challenge for us artists is to think about how we can use them to augment our vision in a given piece. While I have been tempted to paint a painting in celebration of the 'gimmick', I work instead to apply the right gimmick to help tell the story in the right piece.

Favorite Quotes

I love to paint the human form both clothed and not. The body is a landscape which is ever shifting and changing, undulating and pulsing. The subtle shifts of warm to cool  and of values requires the deepest discernment of seeing and thus honesty. No cliches, gimmicks or stereotypes can be employed if the soul through the art is to be revealed. It is my aspiration to paint that way some day. Here are quotes which inspire, humble and direct my course.

For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make.

                        - Spenser, Hymne in Honour of Beautie, 1596

THE NAKED AND THE NUDE

                By Robert Graves (b. 1895)

For me, the naked and the nude

(By lexicographers construed

As synonyms that should express

The same deficiency of dress

Or shelter) stand as wide apart

As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze

On bodies naked and ablaze;

The Hippocratic eye will see

In nakedness, anatomy;

And naked shines the Goddess when

She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly

To hold each treasonable eye.

While draping by a showman’s trick

Their dishabille in rhetoric,

They grin a mock- religious grin

Of scorn at those of naked skin.

The naked, therefore, who compete

Against the nude may know defeat;

Yet when they both together tread

The briary pastures of the dead,

By Gorgons with long whips pursued,

How naked go the sometime nude!

Connotations

Denotations

“The ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings possessed by words (images) are an obstacle to the scientist but a resource to the poet (artist).  Laurence Perrine Sound and Sense

Picasso has often exempted the (nude) from the savage metamorphosis which he has inflicted on the visible world ..´

Kenneth Clark  The Nude pg 4

“What is the nude?” It is an art form invented by the Greeks in the 5^th century. The nude is not the subject of art, but a form of art. ( 5)

“By long habit we do not judge it as a living organism, but as a design: (pg 7)

Du Fresnoy (Mason’s translation)

        For tho’ our casual glance may sometimes meet

With charms that strike thee soul and seem complete.

Yet if those charms too closely we define,

Content to copy nature line for line,

Our end is lost. Not such the master’s care,

Curious he culls the perfect from the fair;

 Judge of his art, thro’ beauty’s realm he flies,

Selects, combines, improves, diversifies;

With nimble step pursues the fleeting throng,

And clasps each Venus as she glides along.

Durer

There lives no man upon earth who can give a final judgment upon what the most beautiful shape of a man may be; God only knows that….

Dipendenza: Michelangelo – His sense of the relationship between the two forms of order -  ideal scheme and functional necessities (architect and draftsman of nude)

Until the beginning of the 20^th century art was used to glorify God.