Ink and wash painting
Photograph by MagnuMicahon Flickr.
As soon as he finished the pupils on one of the dragons, it roared to Panel painting life and flew away in a thunderous flash of lightning. This story embodies the philosophy of Oriental sumi-e. Dow strived for harmonic compositions through three elements: Ink and wash painting line, notan, and color.
Most inksticks are made of either pine or oil soot combined with animal glue (Japanese: nikawa). This makes ink and wash painting a technically demanding art-form requiring great skill, concentration, and years of training. See Calligraphy for more information on the tools used in both Ink and wash painting calligraphy and wash painting. An episode of Nickelodeon s Wonder Pets, titled Save the Crane, has the characters fly into a Sumi-e painting to rescue a baby crane from an erupting volcano. The video game Ōkami, developed by Capcom for the PS2 and Wii systems, is done almost entirely in Ink and wash painting this art style. .
The brush hairs are tapered to a fine point, a feature vital to the style of wash paintings. Different brushes have different qualities. Oriental sumi-e may be regarded as an earliest form of expressionistic art that captures the unseen. Indeed, Oriental sumi-e has long inspired modern artists in the West.
A small wolf-hair brush that is tapered to a fine point can deliver an even thin line of ink (much like a pen). In the hand of a master, a single stroke can produce astonishing variations in tonality, from deep black to silvery gray.
Ink and wash painting is also known by its Chinese name shui-mo hua (水墨畫, Japanese suibokuga (水墨画?), Korean sumukhwa, Vietnamese tranh thuỷ mặc ). When the big cloud brush rains down upon the paper, it delivers a graded swath of ink encompassing myriad shades of gray to black. Once a stroke is painted, it cannot be changed or erased.
A large wool brush (one variation called the big cloud) can hold a large volume of water and ink. When the Abbot insisted, Zhang proceeded to paint the dragons’ eyes.
The goal is not simply to reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to capture its soul. Thus, in its original context, notan means more than just dark-light arrangement, it is the basis for the beautiful nuance in tonality unique to Oriental sumi-e and brush-and-ink calligraphy. In wash paintings, as in calligraphy, artists usually grind their own inkstick (Japanese: sumi) over an inkstone to obtain ink, but prepared inks are also available.
Sumi themselves are sometimes ornately decorated with landscapes or flowers in bas-relief and some are highlighted with gold. Wash painting brushes are similar to the brushes used for calligraphy and are traditionally made from bamboo with goat, cattle, horse, sheep, rabbit, marten, badger, deer, boar or wolf hair. Put together all the good points in such a method, and you have the qualities of the highest art .
Dow’s fascination with sumi-e not only shaped his own approach to art but also helped free many American modernists of the era, including his student Georgia O’Keeffe, from what he called a story-telling approach. Zhang explained that if he painted the pupils, the dragons would come alive.
Ink and wash painting is an East Asian type of brush painting also known as wash painting or by its Japanese name sumi-e (墨絵). To paint a horse, the sumi-e artist must understand its temperament better than its muscles and bones.
Prepared inks are usually of much lower quality. An artist puts a few drops of water on an inkstone and grinds the inkstick in a circular motion until a smooth, black ink of the desired concentration is made.
Only black ink — the same as used in East Asian calligraphy — is used, in various concentrations. In Western art works on paper in similar techniques are generally classified with drawings. Wash painting developed in China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). He painted several dragons but left out the pupils from their eyes.
Every brush-touch must be full-charged with meaning, and useless detail eliminated. Wang Wei is generally credited as the painter who applied color to existing ink and wash paintings. In an old Chinese legend, an artist named Zhang Seng You 張僧繇 was asked to paint a mural in a temple.
Sumi-e artists spend years practicing basic brush strokes to refine their brush movement and ink flow. The Abbot asked him why.
To paint a flower, there is no need to perfectly match its petals and colors, but it is essential to convey its liveliness and fragrance. In his classic book Composition, American artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) wrote this about sumi-e: The painter .put upon the paper the fewest possible lines and tones; just enough to cause form, texture and effect to be felt.
