My art class left the east gate on Tuesday to visit the home of a local painter and calligraphist. Many of my classmates had him for a calligraphy teacher, but I had never met him. We arrived at his beautiful lakeside home and went up to his studio. He pulled out a piece of paper and some ink and simply began to paint a rock. Out of a long squiggly line and a few small strokes came this majestic, traditional-looking painting of a rock. He then held out the brush and asked if anyone would like to try. My classmate’s rock painting looked very much like his. Perhaps this made the rest of us believe Chinese traditional painting was not as hard as it looked. However, as each of us took our turns observing and copying the master, first painting bamboo, then trees, and finally flowers, we all realized that 'easy' was not the right word to describe Chinese paintings.
The word I would use is simple. The teacher that took us there said that she had heard once that black ink on white paper was art. That may be true in the case of the rock. However, as my classmates and I can testify, some random strokes with a nice brush won’t turn a blob of blue ink into a lotus flower or a black line into a bamboo stem. It takes the right stroke in the right place with all sorts of correct pressure and other useful techniques. I am not even an amateur, so I don’t know these things. I only noticed that the artist started with one long stroke. To that he added shorter ones with less ink. Stroke upon stroke, without seeming to have a vision of anything grand (he was just showing us examples of common landscapes), he created art.
He took care to make his landscapes look real, but he took more care to make them balanced, which is an important part of Chinese art. From the firm black splotch of ink on white paper came lovely rocks and trees with blooming flowers. Nothing was splashy and overly done. The colors used were not gaudy. In fact, at first it didn’t look like there was going to be any color, only water on the paper. But when the ink dried, the lotus flower he had just painted was a dramatic silvery blue. I don’t think any of us left unimpressed by the artist’s talent. Also, none of us left without being humbled by the ease and comfort with which he painted. The whole time I kept thinking about how the point of painting is not to recreate the real, but to capture the emotion of the subject. Technique is a side-note, only a tool used to produce a proper vessel from which the sentiments of a painting can emanate.
We learned how to paint rocks, bamboo, trees, lotus flowers, and cherry blossoms. It would seem to me that nature says a thing or two about being firm, resolute, simple, and reticent. Rocks are the firm. Trees and bamboo are the resolute. Lotus plants are the simple and cherry blossoms constantly reticent. If these natural, inhuman beings can embody the qualities that Confucius says are “close to being humane” then what should humans be able to do? We paint them apparently. But in China everything is intertwined and has been for thousands of years. Painting is not for show or to produce change necessarily. I believe landscape art in China can be viewed as a reminder of the Middle Road, or the Way. Confucianism as an ideology has been the focus of all people from the government to the common peasant. It is not surprising that we can also find his teachings in traditional Chinese art.
