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CHATER II THE ELEMENTS OF CHINESE PAINTING

I THE MATERIALS

THE BRUSH. During the course of Chinese history, painting brushes have been made from many different substances. The brush most used at present is a blend of the hairs of the weasel and the hare. It is a little softer than the brush used for writing. The hairs are of varying lengths, bound together in a very delicate operation. The Chinese brush has the property of running into a fine point once it has been moistened. Indeed, it becomes bushy and stiff only after the softer hairs have been quite worn away by the long use. And yet, whenever the artist desires, it can also be made to produce strokes of varying degrees of broadness or even to split into two or more points to produce multiple lines with a single stroke. This explains why, in an ink painting, normally only a single brush is used throughout, this being quite sufficient for the painting of everything from the finest hair stroke to the broadest areas of wash. As a matter of fact it has become axiomatic that, excepting the possible addition of color with other brushes, only one brush should be used for an ink painting, thereby preserving a unity of style in the brushwork.

THE INK. The ink of the Sung period was made from pine soot mixed together with glue and other ingredients, all being compressed into small inksticks, which were decorated with characters or pictures. This ink was jet black and dull—that is, without luster. Since the Ming period, Chinese painters have preferred ink made from lampblack. This ink is slightly bluish and has an almost metallic gleam. Good inksticks are very light in weight, rather brittle, and, when broken, seem to have a crystalline character.

Before beginning to paint, the artist always prepares fresh ink. This is done by rubbing an inkstick in water on an inkstone, an action which for the Chinese artist has as much psychological importance in the preparing of the mind for the work at hand as it has practical application and has long been regarded as an almost sacred rite.

The finer the grain of the inkstone, the smoother the ink and the longer time needed for grinding. The ink is ready for use when it reaches an almost oily consistency, running heavily and sluggishly back down the trails which the inkstick leaves behind on the sloping surface of the stone. By that time the rather sharp noise of the grinding has become muffled and softer. With the gradual evaporation of the water, the mixture becomes still more concentrated.

Sometimes ink is taken onto the brush directly from the inkstone. But, in order to judge and control the thickness, the more usual practice is to take the ink with the brush from the stone into a small porcelain dish. More water may be added as desired to produce the amazingly rich variety of tones of which India ink is capable, from the deepest black to the most delicate pearl-gray. This richness of tone was perhaps one of the reasons why the Chinese inclined toward ink painting, which produces its pictorial effects not with colors but simply with ink tones and brush technique.

THE COLORS. As noted above, ink is the primary medium of Chinese painting. Even when colors are used, with the exception of the boneless painting to be discussed later, they are simply an adjunct to the ink, being superimposed on or filled in between the inked strokes, which usually show through the colors even in the completed picture. For colors, mineral and vegetable pigments are used exclusively. They are available either in the form of color sticks, similar to the inkstick, in which case they already contain glue and are rubbed on an inkstone for colors, or more commonly in powdered form and are made ready by the painter by adding glue and usually hot water just before he wants to use them. Some of the colors, particularly in the more concentrated mixtures, are opaque and do not let the underlying ink strokes show through, thus producing a gouache-like effect, while the thinner colors and mixtures have more of the quality of water colors.

Chinese painting took over the usual mineral and vegetable colors used in all early painting. The most important mineral colors are azurite blue (shih ch'ing), malachite green (shih lü), umber (chih shih), and white lead (ch'ien fen). The main vegetable colors are indigo (hua ch'ing) and rattan yellow (t'eng huang). Among the mixed colors tsao lü, a mixture of indigo and rattan yellow, and chih mo, a mixture of umber and ink, are the most important.

Among the vegetable colors, rattan yellow is obtained from the same kind of reed from which in medieval Europe the color known as dragon's blood was obtained, but the dragon's blood, probably because it was more concentrated, was red in color. Rattan yellow (like dragon's blood) is poisonous, and every Chinese painter is careful not to test the brush with his tongue when it is filled with rattan yellow.

This typically Chinese custom of tongue testing may be briefly mentioned here. Painters control and alter the contents of their brushes with the tongue. They seem to have developed a special aptitude for gauging how much ink or color a brush has by feeling the dampness of it on their tongues. And they use saliva to regulate the ink flow, especially those who paint with a relatively dry brush. It is probably almost impossible to tell whether this method has been used merely by looking at a finished painting. Nevertheless, one Chinese professor of our own time has managed to write a scholarly essay on the control of ink by the tongue in the paintings of Ni Tsan.

The two most important mineral colors, azurite blue and malachite green, are prepared by the artist shortly before use. They settle in four main layers in the mixing dish, the bottom layer being the thickest. This thickest layer, called t'ou ch'ing or t'ou lü (literally, "top blue" or "top green") is opaque; the second layer is less opaque; and the third and fourth are transparent. The painter reaches the different layers with his brush by shoving aside the upper layers and going down in the paint dish to the layer he wants. This layering effect becomes important when we come to consider such styles as the still to be discussed blue-green style (see page 116).

Other frequently used colors include vermilion(chu sha), mineral yellow (shih huang), foreign red (yang hung), and French red (mutan hung). But lapis lazuli is almost never used.

THE PAINTING SURFACE. The painting surface used is paper or silk, placed flat on a table rather than on an easel in the Western manner. Chinese paper is of many qualities and kinds, often sized and treated with glue. Silk is always sized and glued before use. In earlier times the artists sized and glued their own papers and silks, but nowadays these are also available ready for use.

As has often been proved, Chinese painters—particularly the modern ones—prefer paper rather than silk as a painting surface. One explanation that is always given is that paper lasts longer and can better withstand the ravages of time.

SEALS AND COLOPHON. In Chinese painting, seals and a colophon have become an integral part of the picture. The artist usually impresses two seals on a painting, one carved to produce red characters and the other to leave the character in white against a red background. Both give different versions of the artist's real and professional names. Owners of paintings also often add their own seals in some corner of the picture. Cinnabar is used for making the red color used for seals and, if of high quality, can be quite expensive. A good seal color will not fade for hundreds of years, and a firm and equal pressure on the seal will insure an imprint that will remain legible practically throughout the life of the painting. As in the case of all other materials, the matter of seals and seal colors is of ritualistic importance to painters and scholars.

The colophon is written with brush and ink. It may contain various kinds of information: the artist's age or family connections, the occasion, style, or subject matter of the painting, and the like. Both the colophon and the seals often play an important role in establishing the authenticity of a painting, although they can be and have been so skillfully forged that they cannot be accepted as proof positive.

2 THE BRUSH STROKE

THE LINE IS THE FIRST STEP IN ANY attempt to reproduce three-dimensional space on a flat surface. This line is rendered in Chinese painting by a stroke of the brush. There is a direct connection between the brushwork of painting and that of calligraphy. This has been stressed time and time again in China, and Western writers have often accepted this Chinese idea rather uncritically. Certainly in some lower forms of painting, and in some of the higher forms too, the connection is very close indeed. But in a host of forms in between the two extremes, the brushwork, together with all it implies, has undergone many changes. This is particularly true of paintings which achieve their pictorial effect not by using color but by breaking up the brush strokes.

The idea of the reconciling of opposites, which permeates the whole field of Chinese painting, applies also to brush strokes. The expression chuan chih, which literally means "the bent and the straight," is sometimes used as a generic term for painting, for the bent and the straight are the linear means of creating spaces within which the tonal values of ink or color can be effective.

The brush stroke is the first and the deciding step in all Chinese painting. One might even say that the first stroke of the brush decides the whole fate of a painting, for its style will be determined by whether the brush stroke is made with light or heavy ink, with a wet or dry brush, with an even or varying pressure of the hand, with a brush held perpendicularly or at an angle. It is not true, as most people suppose, that a brush stroke cannot be corrected; it can, especially if it has been done in light ink and with a dry brush. Nevertheless, this first brush stroke is presumably made with great deliberation and care, so that actually it is a decisive one.

In applying brush to painting surface it is essential both that the artist be mentally prepared to execute the stroke without hesitation or thought and that he maintain complete control to the tipmost end of the stroke; these are axioms that derive from calligraphy. The brush stroke must have a precisely formed beginning (Fig. 4A), and if there is a tailing off, it must be controlled equally well (4B). The Chinese call the beginning and end of a stroke ch'u pi and ju pi, and the whole movement between must be executed with the same degree of discipline and precision as that shown by the stonemason in Chuang-tzu's parable or in Miyamoto Musashi's masterful painting "Bird on a High Branch" (Fig. 237), which provides an unusually clear example of continuous brush control throughout the execution of a stroke.

Another rule taken over from calligraphy provides that a line whose direction is changed must be painted in the new direction with the other side of the tuft (Fig. 4c). This is to say that the tuft of the brush is tilted over with the change of direction, no matter whether the change be angular or rounded. To the novice this rule may seem unnecessary and pointless. But anyone who has steeped himself in the character of Chinese brushwork soon realizes that it is precisely on such seemingly trivial details that an essential part of the freshness, lightness, and skill of the brush technique depends.

The theorists of Chinese painting have, during the course of centuries, evolved a nomenclature for a very large number of different strokes; that is, they have given names to all the varieties of lines which the masters have used. So we have names such as "iron wires" (Fig. 4D) and "lines like nails" (4B). One kind of line even carries the imaginative title of "nail-headed rat tail" (4E and 65). Lines may be executed with a dry brush (4F) or a wet one (4G), with continuously equal pressure (4 F-G) or with changing pressure (4H).

It may be argued that the christening of lines is a matter for the critic rather than the painter, the primary function of such nomenclature being to communicate the phenomena of brush techniques in words. As a matter of fact, the painter who is interested only in painting generally pays little attention to such distinctions. And for this reason in this book these terms are used as sparingly as possible.

Just as a sword stroke demands a special grip on the hilt, and an arrow shot demands a special co-ordination of finger, arm, and hand, so the brush stroke demands that the brush be held in a certain way. It is therefore essential to understand how the Chinese brush is held before one can grasp the techniques of painting. It must not be forgotten that Chinese characters were not originally written with a brush but were scratched onto bone or tortoise shell with tools of stone, bronze, or iron. Certain forms were developed from this method of writing which were definitely not intended for the brush. In course of time, however, the brush was evolved and came into its own in the writing of Chinese characters. If today the old seal writing or the early scratch writing from the period of the oracle bones is still sometimes reproduced by means of a brush, this is an anachronism which reveals nothing of the real qualities of the brush except perhaps its amazing versatility in the hands of an expert.

The brush is held, not close to the tuft, but in the middle or even at the top of the handle, depending upon the size of strokes to be made. Only for the most detailed brushwork is the hand supported at the wrist; in all other cases it is unsupported and moves freely from the wrist.

For the characteristic Chinese grip (Fig. 5), the brush is normally held perpendicular between thumb and index finger, with the middle finger also touching the brush somewhat behind and below the index finger, while the ring finger, in conjunction with the little finger, supports the brush from the opposite side. It is this combination of support from both sides that permits the artist to move the brush freely in all directions over the flat painting surface and at the same time to maintain constant and complete control over all its movements. Looking again for a moment at Fig. 5, one should note that the brush is being held in a position to produce rather long strokes; for shorter strokes the only difference would be that the brush would be gripped nearer the tuft. The middle finger is here concealed by the width of the brush. This picture, incidentally, comes from the so-called Ten Bamboos Studio, the Shih-chu-chai Shu-hua-p'u (The Repertory of Writing and Painting from the Ten Bamboos Studio), which was edited by Hu Cheng-yen between 1619 and 1627 and contains a great number of beautifully executed woodblock prints.

The Chinese have always liked to think that their painting and its techniques developed without any outside influences. To say that this view is mistaken and that they in fact owe much to non-Chinese sources certainly does not in any way lessen the greatness of the Chinese achievement. The important thing is what the Chinese made of the ideas and techniques they adopted from other sources. No one can doubt that Chinese painting is among the greatest that the world has ever produced. And this all-important issue of the brush grip justifies the conclusion that we here find a purely Chinese development.

I have a theory that there is a connection between the Chinese brush grip and that depicted, probably about the seventh century, in the so-called Painters' Cave at Kyzyl, in Turkestan (Fig. 6). Here the brush is held neither as the Europeans have long held their writing instruments nor yet in the Chinese manner. Instead, the grip is somewhere in between the two, but rather closer to the Chinese. Since, as we shall see in the next paragraph, there is good reason to believe the Chinese had developed their characteristic brush grip several centuries earlier, it seems likely that in these cave paintings we see a transition stage in brush technique resulting either from Chinese influences or perhaps from the fact that the painters, if actually of Chinese extraction themselves, were too far from China's artistic center to have progressed further.

The painted tiles excavated at Lo-yang and now in the Boston Museum (Fig. 7) provide one of the earliest examples of Chinese painting, probably dating from the late second or early third century. In their extremely lively and expressive drawing we find many features that were to characterize later Chinese painting. The brushwork particularly is very highly developed for such an early period: the swell and fall of the individual brush strokes, the terminations of the strokes now broad and now tapering to fine points, the tilting of the brush to produce both square and rounded changes of direction—all these are features of a mature technique that could scarcely have arisen except from the typically Chinese brush grip we have been describing. Even though we cannot speak positively here, nor state that the Chinese brush grip developed at precisely such and such a time, we can take it for granted that in these tile paintings we are not dealing with the work of some provincial artist who, in style, technique, and taste, limped after the masters of China proper. They are evidently the work of an artist who had thoroughly mastered the technique of the brush.

Although the difference between the brush grips of Kyzyl and, if we are right in our suppositions, the painted tiles may seem slight, it is actually of greatest importance. We have no way of knowing precisely when the ring finger and the little finger moved in China from the front to the underside of the brush, but it was a decisive moment, comparable to the use of the stirrup in warfare. Through this latter discovery, the Mongols were able to control their ponies so well that they could shoot their arrows from a gallop and sweep victoriously to the very gates of Europe. And once the Chinese painter had gained this complete control over his brush, he too could metaphorically shoot his arrows from a gallop to outpaint the world.

3 MOUNTAINS AND ROCKS

OUTLINES. Turning from the technical factors which supply the essential backbone to all Chinese painting, we now move to the more specific elements based upon the former: to the building up of a Chinese painting from the first stroke to the last dot. Here we shall be dealing primarily with landscape painting both because it is one of the most typical forms of Chinese painting and because, by common consent, it represents a peak of the Chinese artistic genius.

Rock, mountain, water, and tree grow in many stages, through many layers of ink, to become a finished landscape painting. The four chief stages in this process of growth are, first, the outlines; second, the shaping lines; and finally, in either order, the washes and the dots. These stages often merge indistinguishably into each other and, depending upon the artist and his intentions, may also include certain subsidiary stages. The outlines are the beginning of the structure. They can be superimposed over each other in several layers of ink, either in lighter ink first and then heavier, or the other way round.

The two accompanying figures provide examples of graphic contrast of the light and heavy outlines; Fig. 8 shows light outlines plus many shaping lines. If the outlines are first put in with a lighter ink, then it is possible to make changes or corrections when applying the second layer. The transition from outlines in lighter ink to shaping lines is not so noticeable or so dramatic as the transition from heavy-ink outlines to shaping lines. In applying a first layer of light-ink outlines there is a tendency to render them in the washlike strokes of a kind often used for shaping lines; the danger here is that the forms will remain flat and lack contrast, thereby giving a sketchy impression.

Outlines which are put in first in heavier ink (Fig. 9) make corrections or changes practically impossible. Therefore it requires greater skill to begin with the heavier ink, particularly since the characteristics of the outlines decide the style of the whole picture. The outlines merge into the shaping lines unnoticeably and without any gradations. However, to distinguish between the two, it can be said that the outlines are usually the longer components, while the shaping lines are mostly put together out of shorter single components.

The untrained eye will scarcely be able to tell the difference between outlines started in heavier or lighter ink. This may be quite irrelevant, and it may seem unimportant to distinguish between them. Actually though, just such apparently unimportant differences occur throughout the whole of Chinese painting; and the quality and genuineness of any work can only be judged by someone who has been trained to recognize them. Unless considerations of style demand a different approach, a master painter will usually begin his original painting with heavier outlines. But the imitator, or the forger, both following the same original, will begin with light ink so they can make corrections as they go along and later put in the decisive shapes with heavier ink.

In Figs. 10 and 11, a superficial examination will fail to reveal in which order the inks were applied. Closer examination, however, reveals certain distinguishing characteristics. Putting on the heavier ink first, as in Fig. 10, tends to give a stronger, harder, more linear effect, and a clear gradation between outline and shaping line is noticeable. When the lighter ink is put on first, as in Fig. 11, the painting becomes generally softer and suggests an immediate transition to a wash. Of course this latter example also contains shaping lines, but they are not so clear as in the first example.

From the above, it becomes evident that the artist's choice of light or dark ink for his outlines—or for any other area—has nothing to do with questions of light and shade, of chiaroscuro effects. Their use is based on an entirely different principle: that of balancing the light and the heavy, the advancing and the retreating, the acting and the reacting. The arrangement of the forms passes beyond the sphere of plastic composition into aesthetics, where we meet once again the principle of the identity or balance of opposites.

SHAPING LINES. The outlines which define rock, mountain, and tree as distinct shapes in the landscape slide unnoticeably into other lines which give a modeled texture to flat areas within the outlines. The Chinese word for these lines, ts'un, is difficult to translate. In English they have been called "wrinkles" or "shading" or "modeling"; in French, Petrucci calls them "traits." There is no generally accepted German word; one might talk loosely of "Runzeln," "Schrunden," or "Faltung," but none of these terms describes more than a part of the total function of these lines. The word "shading" wrongly suggests light and shade, while "modeling" is achieved in other ways. So we have called them "shaping lines," feeling that this name most accurately defines the Chinese ts'un and is at the same time comprehensive enough to include various types of lines.

Shaping lines constitute the most important element of Chinese landscape painting. In them the collective experience of the Chinese painting tradition and of the individuality of the painter are most purely expressed. One is tempted to say, in modification of Buffon's dictum, "Le style est l'homme même": The style is the ts'un.

Shaping lines can either follow strictly traditional rules or express the highly personal conception of an individual master, but the more frequent case is a mixture of traditional and personal qualities. The painter inevitably expresses his own personality in his shaping lines, even when trying most painstakingly to copy the shaping lines of a great master. The process is comparable to an attempt to copy another person's handwriting and, in doing so, leaving certain clues which a trained graphologist could recognize. These clues would be the involuntary expression of the copier's own personality. To carry this figure of speech a bit further, it can be said that one has to examine the brushwork of a master with the precision of a graphologist in order to ascertain a picture's genuineness. Only by equally thorough means can one judge the work of a master beyond any shadow of doubt or distinguish between a copy and the original, a late work and an early one, a master and an epigone. If so many spurious paintings are to be found in our museums, and if paintings ascribed to old masters have recently so often been re-evaluated as belonging to later periods, this results from the fact that hardly anyone, so far, has bothered to provide the tools for a critical analysis of brushwork.

When a painter aims at producing an original composition rather than at reproducing an earlier style, he will deliberately or instinctively adapt the traditional shaping lines to his own use. Or he will effect a new combination of accepted shaping lines of a similar kind. Or, finally, he will create variations of his own in which the original shapes will be hardly recognizable. The Chinese traditionally distinguished sixteen or more kinds of shaping lines, not counting the subsidiary kinds. These were conveniently divided into three large categories by the Japanese art historian Kimbara Shōgo: thread-shaped lines, band-shaped lines, and dot-shaped lines. Benjamin March, in his useful little book Some Technical Terms of Chinese Painting, adopted these three categories and added a few minor kinds of lines to produce the following list (given here in a somewhat different order from the one he used):

A) Thread-shaped lines:

1) Luan ma ts'un: shaping lines like tangled hemp stalks. Also called luan ch'ai ts'un: shaping lines like tangled bundles of brushwood.

2) Ho yeh ts'un: like the veins of lotus leaves.

3) Chieh so ts'un: like unraveled hemp rope.

4) P'i ma ts'un: like spread-out hemp fibers.

5) Ma p'i ts'un: like a tangled ball of hemp fibers.

6) Luanyün ts'un: like rolling billows of cloud.

7) Niu mao ts'un: like cow hair.

8) P'o wang ts'un: like a torn net.

9) Fan t'ou ts'un: like lumps of alum.

10) Tan wo ts'un: like the eddies of a whirlpool.

11) Kuei mien ts'un: like the wrinkles on a demon's face.

B) Band-shaped lines:

1) Hsiao fu p'i ts'un: shaping lines like the cuts made by a small axe.

2) Tafu p'i ts'un: like the cuts made by a big axe.

3) Che-tai-ts'un: like broken bands.

4) Maya ts'un: like horses' teeth.

C) Dot-shaped lines: