Milk, Seals, and other Essentials for ending Chinese Brush Paintings

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.

Naming Names

When Cherrett moved into "figure painting" I was expecting the paucity of trivia in the book to be no more. However, I was wrong.

Up to the  point Cherrett has done little to bring in actual lore. Yet, when she mentions such legendary figures as Chung K'uei, it's hard to imagine her doing much else than devoting a sentence or two to these famous names. Cherrett does nothing of the sort, though. Instead she repeats the names of famous figures throughout her chapter on figures.

It's fine to know such names, but it would be inspiring to actually read what gave them an enduring name in the first place.

A Trivia Trickle like a Thinly Painted Line

Once Cherrett starts getting into the various subjects of Chinese Brush Painting, she also gets into the trivial tidbits and cultural information that I expected.

These details are given directly in short, chapter-ending sections that are about 1/5 of a page. Though, these direct tellings are so straightforward that you'd easily be able to organize what the subjects Cherrett describes symbolize into a table. No extra detail is given aside from various subjects and what they symbolize - whether it's a specific month, season, emotion, or state of being.

However, as Cherrett writes about painting birds and insects, and animals, she continually emphasizes the importance of making them appear lively. In so doing she'll often mention things like sparrows being loud and cheeky, or how elephants need to appear heavy and strong. Some of these references to culture are similar enough to Western ideas that their distinct Chinese qualities are obscured (like the elephants being heavy and strong), but others offer an indirect look at Chinese attitudes towards various creatures (such as sparrows being cheeky).

Along with this trickle of information, Cherrett includes a wealth of fabulous brush paintings that vividly show lively, animated subjects.

Too Artsy?

Pauline Cherret writes with the authority of an experienced teacher. Each page of An Introduction to Chinese Brush Painting reads like an excerpt from an art class.

However, this means that the emphasis of the book is on actually brush painting rather than giving a sense of the art's trivia and history. The subtitle-esque line "technique - light - color - composition - style" on the cover should have been clear that this is an instructional work rather than an informative one, but still.

This book's a delight to just read because it gives a good sense of how someone with authoritative experience in an artistic field communicates that experience. And getting samples of such a tone and register is important work for anyone looking to write such characters at some point or other.

Getting back to the instructiveness of the book, though, some of the diagrams are a little bit cluttered by too many arrows and description. Surely you could learn how to brush paint from this book, but it would need to be studied as much as a teacher's method or your own lecture notes.

Brushing Up

From page one of An Introduction to Chinese Brush Painting onwards, Pauline Cherret presents her information in a direct, concise manner that's very well edited. However, the book is dedicated to actually teaching the art of Chinese Brush Painting, rather than informing about it.

As such, the introduction jumps right into your essential equipment. Any bits of history are tossed out along the way, sticking where they will and being almost entirely page dressing.

Nonetheless, Cherret's instructions are easy to understand, though I'm not sure how effective learning something like painting from a book would be. After all, it's easy enough to write out a description for a certain brush stroke, but trying to emulate said stroke without a final assessment or without help along the way seems ill-advised. Practising on your own might also be difficult, since the paper necessary for Brush Painting doesn't come cheap. So this could be a rather pricey hobby.

Aside from the book's teaching text, some tidbits of trivia are found in the numerous photo and painting captions.

Hopefully, as the book's techniques get more complex more such information's given. The paragraph explaining what flowers mean is a dense and curious one. I only hope there are more like it within.