Pick up a brush. Dip it in ink. Touch paper. Simple, right? And that is what everybody thinks, until the time when their first stroke resembles a terrified caterpillar crawling through the page. The Tingology has a knack of making people humble very fast.
An important course does not offer you how to imitate beautiful pictures. It rewires how your eyes work. It is not the green stalk of bamboo, not merely tall, all of a sudden there is some tension there, some personality, there is a lean that reminds you what direction the wind was blowing. Learners tend to say that such a transition occurs without prior notice, and silently. One day you are not able to make simple strokes. The second, you are reading a tree like it is a sentence.
The first vice practice that instructors combat is control. Each fresh intruder knots his brush like a dog. Ink painting is a kind of feedback reaction to that power, a stiff stroke, dead line, zero flow. It is a practice that requires more than control. It asks for trust. Breathe before the stroke. Release during it. This is what teachers keep on repeating. They’re not being poetic.
The coursework is taken in a logical sequence, although logical does not mean soft. Basic marks should be learned first: horizontal pulls, vertical drops, tapered strokes, and the notorious bone line – 1 mark that gives an instructor all the information about the tension area in the student. Following this, the subjects of classical subjects replace it. Bamboo. Orchid. Plum blossom. Chrysanthemum. Both of them are not only painting exercises, but a cultural argument dating back a millennium. Bamboo does not break – that says something. Plum blossoms going through frost imply otherwise. To study the subjects is to learn what you really mean by that.
Painters with long experience discuss the thought that occurs prior to laying hand to paper. Some call it clearing. Some simply shut up and gazed at nothing. What students who consider this strange tend to do is to eventually come back round. Those who do not are more likely to make paintings that appear… agitated.
Water is the element that is not supposed to be a thing one is obsessed with. Excessively little, and the brush scurries gritiness over the surface. Too much, and ink spurts and spurts outwards: You can not make it back. There is a combination of five various tonal values living in a single loaded brush. Their location is a tactic and not a calculation.
Composition completes higher learning – grouping in odd numbers, the intensity in empty space, the diagonal lines that transform a stationary image into one that is in movement. The trouble here is usually with Western-trained artists. The rules aren’t unfamiliar. The priorities are.
Xuan paper responds to air moisture, oh. Before starting a painting session, professional painters measure the humidity. That’s not metaphor. That’s just Wednesday.