stumbling in the dark
Sumi-e is hard. Wah.
The book I have (which is not with me) talks a fair bit about symbolism and gives prescribed ways to render various plant parts, which is at odds with what I understand of rendering (all variations on the Drawing on the Right Side school, which advocates forgetting what you think you know about what a class of objects looks like, in order to draw reality more accurately.) Chinese brushes are difficult tools for short, fat strokes, and yet I know it ought to be possible to render, let us say, a spruce cone using only these tools, spruce trees being fairly traditional subjects after all, and I suspect there is an established Group Of Strokes to do it but I don't know what it is and painting-by-technique-number sounds not-right. The approach of non-attachment to preset notions of what tree cones look like sounds like the right thing, but results in masses of strokes that have no tonal differentiation and so do not look like objects at all.
[Snarky observation on how all this ties in with this morning's reading goes here: { }]
I'm sure at heart these are not opposing perspectives. That much seems obvious, just not the part of painting that is, y'know, painting.
The book I have (which is not with me) talks a fair bit about symbolism and gives prescribed ways to render various plant parts, which is at odds with what I understand of rendering (all variations on the Drawing on the Right Side school, which advocates forgetting what you think you know about what a class of objects looks like, in order to draw reality more accurately.) Chinese brushes are difficult tools for short, fat strokes, and yet I know it ought to be possible to render, let us say, a spruce cone using only these tools, spruce trees being fairly traditional subjects after all, and I suspect there is an established Group Of Strokes to do it but I don't know what it is and painting-by-technique-number sounds not-right. The approach of non-attachment to preset notions of what tree cones look like sounds like the right thing, but results in masses of strokes that have no tonal differentiation and so do not look like objects at all.
[Snarky observation on how all this ties in with this morning's reading goes here: { }]
I'm sure at heart these are not opposing perspectives. That much seems obvious, just not the part of painting that is, y'know, painting.