Painting: bamboo

[corvi]

Painting class restarted yesterday! I have become quite unused to being around people, and that part was rather intimidating.

Surprisingly, I was the only returning student; there were also three new students. We painted bamboo, which is the traditional first step to learning the traditional flower school of brush painting. Since I've been studying the mountain school, I hadn't done bamboo before.

.How to paint bamboo. ("Node" for the joints in the bamboo stem and "internode" for the cylindrical segments was not her terminology, but I don't remember what she actually called them.)

Paint internodes first:

• Use an absorbent brush for a thick smooth line - rabbit or goat hair core, with deer hair around the outside for a bit of structural stability.
• Tip of the brush should be almost pure black ink. Rest of brush should just be very wet, so the ink spreads and you get a smooth gradient in the brush, darkest at tip, lightest at handle.
• Paint the bamboo stem with the brush pressed against the paper and pulled along sideways, so you're leaving a mark that matches the ink gradient in the brush.
• Paint each internode as a single slightly curved stroke.
• Pause at the beginning and end so the brush spreads a bit.
• Leave a gap between internodes.

Next paint nodes:

• Wolf or deer hair brush.
• Just draw a little arc in the gap between the internodes to imply cylindricity.
• The end of the gap can point up or down but should join to the internode.

Third paint leaves:

• Wolf or deer hair brush. You want the brush to be stiff and responsive to small changes in pressure.
• Leaves come in groups of 3 or 5. They shouldn't radiate out from a single point like flower petals.
• Leaves may point upwards (sunny bamboo - symbolizes youth and energy) or downwards (rainy bamboo, symbolizes endurance and fortitude) but not usually both in the same painting. There's also wind bamboo, where presumably they all point approximately sideways.
• Paint the leaves slowly. Slower than that. Slow down, corvi . Don't flick the brush like that, actually move your hand through the leaf. Slooooow.
• Paint from the stem to the point. Backtrack slightly at the beginning to make the stem end round.

Here's a Rainy Bamboo Leaf sampler page the instructor made:

 
Fourth paint little branches (or go back and forth between leaves and branch if you prefer):

• A small brush. (I didn't have a small combination brush, so I used my deer hair brush)
• Branches come out of the nodes and head in the general direction of the leaves
• Don't worry about having every leaf connected to a branch
• Have some extra branches
• Branches should be graceful and bendy
• Branches should not be too symmetric; like trees, they should have a "deer antler" feel.

Here's a sample painting the instructor made with branches and leaves, but no big blocky stalks. This one is a "rainy bamboo" too.


Here's what I made in class:



I feel like... "yup, that's bamboo all right."

In my opinion, it's quite decent for a first ever bamboo painting, and arguably my first flower school painting. I think that indicates that a lot of the moisture control and brush handling I worked on painting mountains is still with me, hooray. It's even painted on newsprint - I was out of real paper - which takes extra control, it's spongy and ink tends to soak in and spread. So I'm pleased with my ink-herding, but honestly it's not a very interesting piece. It has a certain shower curtain feel to it.

Because it grows quickly and is unbroken by wind and snow, bamboo is representative of uprightness, endurance, strength, dependability, hard work, and virtue. It's very Confucian! There are several famous painters who painted only bamboo.

I am not finding bamboo very exciting to paint. I'm not sure if that's just the shower-curtainness of my first bamboo painting, and I'd discover new depths if I did more bamboo painting, or if painting bamboo just isn't very interesting to me in general.

I looked through the Book of Bamboo in my copy of the classic Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden in search of bamboo inspiration, but while I recognize the skill and flow of the masters, none of the pieces really said Wow I Need To Paint One Like This. Perhaps I am insufficiently hard working and virtuous to really "get" bamboo.

Currently undecided on whether to work on bamboo at home this week, skip ahead to the next flower (plum blossom, which I quite like, and I could work on something forivy , who also like plum blossoms), or just practice some trees, rocks, and water.

Please share cool bamboo art and photos if you've got 'em.

Comments

[dorchadas]

Oh, I really like that picture. There's a nice simplicity to the ink paintings above that maybe better gets the bamboo symbolism across better, but this one reminds me of the bamboo forest a few minutes' walk from my old house in Chiyoda.

It would probably be a blurry black mess in ink, sadly.