Before concluding her An Introduction to Chinese Brush Painting, Cherrett goes over some advanced techniques. There are some that involve varying the water content of your paint, or the order in which you apply water and ink/colour, or crumpling the paper for a textured appearance. The strangest by far though, is using milk either as a kind of wash. Weirder still is that the higher the fat content of the milk, the better the milk will show up.
Perhaps there are some Chinese brush painters locally, since homogenized milk is a favourite at one of the local grocery stores.
Rather appropriately for her subject, Cherrett also includes a brief section on calligraphy and seals - the final touches to any brush painting. The tables showing various seals and various characters for different weather that she includes are no more than 3/4 of the page in size, but are still very informative. And, of course, they offer a glimpse into Chinese culture, much more than any of the previous tables or even whole sections, in fact.
Insights into how some characters changed from clear ideograms into more stylized Chinese, and into some of the sayings on seals ("An intimate friend at a remote corner of the world," and "Do not envy glory and profit," for example) are greatly appreciated, even if they're only pages from the book's end.
To anyone interested in Chinese Brush Painting, this is an excellent guide that holds your hand for the basics, but lets it go almost immediately thereafter. For the curious, however, this is just an art guide with a few pages worth of explicit trivia and cultural information.
No comments:
Post a Comment