The Asian influence in drawing
Friday, October 18, 2002
The Asian influence in drawing
*
Excerpt from Shan-shui lun
Midpoints [waists] of mountains are cloud-filled,
Walls of rock are spring-filled,
Towers and terraces are tree-filled,
Roads and paths are people-filled.
In stones, one sees three faces,
In paths, one sees two ends,
In trees, one sees the crowning tops,
In water, one sees the wind's footprints.
These are the methods...
Attributed to Wang Wei (701-761), Hua-hsüeh pi-chüeh (Secret of the Study of Painting). CKHLLP, pp. 596-597.
From Early Chinese Texts on Painting, Compiled and edited by Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1985, p. 173.
*
When I had lunch today with Lloyd he asked about the Asian influence on these latest drawings. There are two things at work here.
Indian and Persian miniatures first interested me in about 1978, and I always return to them for their impeccable formal qualities: brilliant and bold jewel-like colors; linear space made using skewed, rigid perspective mixed with layered, receding space; detailed delicacy and intricacy; beautiful, fine-lined drawing and precise brushwork; dazzling patterning butted against solid flat planes of color. Not to mention how the images of these paintings tell stories of people, places, royalty and religion, but also that the very paintings themselves are pieces of stories about class, politics, geography, and patronage. A pretty good introductory exhibit is at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The other factor is my increasing, though not terribly well educated, appreciation of the kinds of space in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean painting of the last several hundred years. There is so much to take pleasure in: the varieties of brushwork; the ranges of grays; the spaces created and implied by stacked and layered shapes, by diluting of ink and the constrasts of soft and hard, long and short, fat and thin, wet and dry, straight, curvy, or jagged strokes, by the course of a path or river, and the more ambiguous "holes" disruptions, and leaps in space; the subtle coloring of the inks; and the colors, textures, and patterns of framing fabrics. I seem particularly thought not exclusively drawn to Chinese landscape painting from around the 17th through the late 19th century. The resources for a wonderful exhibit a few months back at BAMPFA is still online: Masterworks of Chinese Painting: In Pursuit of Mists and Clouds
Something I like about each of these kinds of paintings is that all of the painting is right in front of you. I mean, you can follow every move of the painter. Shifting your gaze you can break down the brushstrokes and remove them from the images they make to see the brushstrokes themselves, and how they stand alone or integrate to create an image. I love the abstraction of these paintings. If you relax and gaze and look close and breath the material in from of you it is not a huge leap from these paintings to much Western abstract painting (see below).
[L] The Minassian Collection of Persian, Mughal, and Indian Miniature Paintings, The John Hay Library Brown University
[R] Chinese Paintings 12th century - 20th century,
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive UC Berkeley Berkeley, CA
*
I want to link to Dayku again. Lloyd, did you know when you wrote "Is your mom waving anti-war signs along a busy city street?" that you would wind up with a haiku? See Dayku on Wednesday, October 16.
And see Dayku's list of links to war-related readings and resources.
*
What's with the colored blocks?
Say...
The opinions or statements
expressed herein should not be taken as a position of or endorsement
by the University of California, Berkeley. Nor should the
opinions or statements expressed herein be taken as a position
of or endorsement of the University of California, Berkeley.
Links on these pages to commercial sites do not represent
endorsement by the University of California or its affiliates.
|
