Art in China- Part II

Just last week I went to a free class on Chinese watercolor painting. I have always wanted to be able to express myself with color on paper but I really have no painting skills. I tried oil painting when I was fifteen. I took a class on Saturday mornings at the local craft shop in Summerland. While the teacher was very skilled, I sadly was not. I still can sketch a very mean looking hill and a couple of trees, but lighting, shading and perspective (not to mention getting the shape right) escape me. However, the price was right, and I thought that there might be a chance that as a returning student (we all know from experience at university how hard they work at everything), I might have improved somewhat. And despite my lack of talent, I had fun.

The class began with a power point presentation about Chinese painting. It once was one of the four basic skills of the literati: calligraphy, playing Qin, a string instrument, and playing Qi, a board game based with a strategic framework, were the other three. There are four treasured supplies of the Chinese painter: the brush, hui (ink sticks),xuan (paper) and the ink stone. The context of Chinese painting didn't contain nearly as much detail as I would have liked, but the demonstration from the teacher, more than made up for it.

The brush is to be the critical factor to the style of painting (according to the interpreter, being Chinese is also the other factor to being able to paint in this style- a point I dearly wanted to debate with her). It is a fairly thick brush with a fine tip and is soft to the touch. I've just reviewed my notes to see whether I included a reference to the brush material; I did not. However, I recall some discussion of wolf hairs (with a quick internet search, I found a reference or two to Chinese brushes made with premium wolf tail hair). Holding the brush in an upright manner, is also another feature of the style of painting.

Laoshe (teacher), loaded up his brush and we all watched carefully as we had been notified that we would all have the opportunity to try it ourselves once the demonstration was over. All the students had agreed prior to the demonstration, that we would try our hands at a lotus flower.

He dipped his brush into the water. Then he primed the brush with white, then loaded the middle part of the brush with a mixture of red and white, and then gently placed the tip of the brush in the red paint. He made very quick strokes of the brush and in front of our eyes, places several petals on the paper. Once the petals were in place, he carefully mixed white, yellow and blue to create the stems and the leaves. Lastly, he dipped a finer brush through some black ink to give the leaves some shape. It was all down on paper pretty quickly, and despite my desire to commit all of his strokes and placement to memory, I have to admit,once I faced my own piece of paper, I could not remember where to start. He was kind enough to repeat the strokes on a piece of paper taped to the chalk board and in a step by step fashion.

I will not be including a photo of my "art work" here- let's just say that although I performed much better than I expected, I'm not ready for an exhibit of my work. If you want to see it, it's on the door of my refrigerator here in Shanghai.