A Light Segmented

 
Forming part of the upcoming Modern Ink Collection this comparatively dramatic watercolor captures a layered yet cohesive contrast in textures. Staying within a more limited color palette allows for striking contrasts throughout. The shape and form of Chinese painting techniques capturing a marked departure from other schools of composition: please click here to access the full post or here to [expand title="read more"]
 
"'Technique has no autonomous rights in artistic activity; it merely serves the mental process.' And precisely in Chinese painting the use and function of the media always have implications going beyond their own intrinsic value - but also beyond the object which they depict; looking at the matter from our Western viewpoint, however, we cannot help being surprised at how early in the course of historical development they began to play an independent role as the vehicles of expression.
 
This difference in the attitude to the media is also the cause of what seems at first. a different way of seeing things in Chinese painting as compared with the vision of similar themes expressed in Western art. Whilst in China, too, technique serves the purpose of giving artistic form to objects and also of expressing the painter's attitude to these objects, the different media lead to a fundamentally different mode of representation. 'The tool conditions the manner of seeing' of the Chinese artist as well.
 
Furthermore, the nature of the technique is at present the only starting-point we have for deciding whether a work is authentic and for judging its artistic quality, the individual forms and the choice of subjects being largely determined by traditional norms and rules, so that originality in Chinese painting is expressed less in what is depicted than in how it is depicted. Because of this the art historian concerned with the analysis of individual works and with a reconstruction of stylistic evolution must closely study both the media and the related question of quality. Even the very 'description' of a Chinese picture, namely a rigorous analysis of its structure, must unfailingly take account of the problems of the media if it is to disclose and illumine all the levels of the picture. In the West the problem of the artist's handwriting acquires importance very early on in graphic art, but it is a striking fact that even model analyses of the structure of paintings can almost ignore this aspect without becoming inaccurate or incomplete
 
Generalizing, one might say that in European art history the brush stroke really develops into an independent artistic value and means of expression -- apart from a few precursors like Tintoretto or the late Titian -- only with the Baroque. Prior to this the predominant element in painting is 'interest in the object' (Sachinteresse -- M. Friedländer) directed towards the form -- the outline and volume -- and the colour of the objects and their situation in space, which is increasingly conceived in illusionistic terms. The painter actually strives to subordinate his handwriting to what he sees as realistic representation and to smother it. He succeeds in doing this by laying on several layers of transparent colour, by glazes that create the correct tone only when seen all together, by scumbling, and by suppressing the outlines. The result of this traditional painting technique is that, according to our contemporary eye, the artist's true temperament speaks far more clearly from his drawings, his coloured sketches, designs, and cartoons than from his finished pictures. This fact alone places Chinese pictorial art closer to Western drawing than to Western painting; strictly speaking the correct term to apply to it would be 'brush drawing'" Roger Goepper, The Essence of Chinese Painting, 1963
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Tattoo Temple - Joey Pang