A Kingfisher Resting in the Lotus Pond

 

I have in my blood an uneasy need for change, which is the constant evolution of perpetual search for progress in my métier. The thought of finding some new secret of this difficult craft has always haunted me. I have to modify the expressive technique, when setting out the new esthetic ideas, it comes to the means by which they convey the dreams through art. This means that I should pursue a wider knowledge of the resources of my art, that I remain forever an apprentice.

 

Years of obstinate plodding along the same path of painting dotted with difficulties and successes, with anxious self-questioning and uncertainty, I am still able to carry my purpose which is impelled by a desire of escaping from the confines of tradition and the finality of a kind of visual form. The presence of whatever model in a work is just passing reference; it enables me to be assured that my invention is not moving improbably far from the truth.

 

I find that when I abandoned the habitual expressive way, I were not only richer in experience, I were ready to be myself. Therefore each version of the lotus pond would reveal an essentially different ramification of my spirit and feelings.

 

In this painting, I draw a kingfisher perching on the stem of the seed cup. This brightly colored bird is so beautiful that in China in the Qing dynasty, many headdress ornaments wore by the empresses and imperial concubines were covered with kingfisher feathers. My concern of the bird is to retain its glistening textures with the technique of small strokes, with which I endeavored to create voluminous form.

 

I also developed the forms of the seed cup, the leaves, flower in my composition sculpturally and they also take the subtle lights well; here the picturesque could serve to firm up the whole and impose coherence.

 

This is the last painting, the tenth version of the serial of ‘Lotus Pond’. I would apply myself to carrying on the next stage of my development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Slice of Glittering Night Scene of the Lotus Pond

 

Out of doors, there is a greater variety of light than the interiors, where to all intents and purposes it is constant. But for just reason, light plays too great a part in the broad daylight, and all the entities are subject to the luminary whose shafts of sunlight illuminates all things and produces a kind of momentary effects according to different hours. The individualities of objects are indeterminate. When Nature is under cover of night, the vague visual images of the existences tempt us to figure out what they are and what forms they are in. Regarding a painting of night motif, an artist has to exercise his penetrating vision to give the obscure nature a marvelous sense of the contents, and also a sense of the form of the soul.

 

It is proper for an artist not to want to stand still, finding a new language to express his new approach to art, but if it fail to have reference to the reality of nature, it is about to perish of dryness and vacuum. For nature is an inexhaustible reservoir of energy, images, emotions, rhythms and light, that everyone can draw the strength of his expression from the earth itself, and such strong relationship built up could vivify every brush-stroke. There is something more about painting the night scene of nature; it is like closing the eyes to the outside world, and let the feelings of nature’s inward musicality and bewitching mystery being the leaven that provoke and accelerate the germination and blossoming of a slice of a silent night.

 

The visions of night solicit my imagination. Each detail in the painting is carefully described and loving positioned, that flowingly reveals each intrinsic element, detached from and yet inseparable from the whole work. The scene being shrouded in night mist, the appearance of objects will keep fading, but my persistent attempt is to pin down their outward appearance, shimmering in the dim moon light. The contours of the distant lotus leaves are delineated with soft light tone to make it visible in the dark environment, while the front leaves are immerged in the misty night.

 

The external reality was transposed into tonal rhythms, charming in subtlety and gracefulness. In this work, with a subtle difference given by a tone that I was looking for and which I have found at last. The background must be suffusion of air and light; they have to be vague because they must not distract us; especially the two roses in the upper right corner, I treat them with undertone, and give a sensation of soft freshness and porousness, whereas the plastic intensity is given to the lotus flower with the much more resonant and high-pitched quality of hue. The butterflies and bird retaining their opacity and their solidity dispute the field with the transmutation into the land of spirit by turning them into phantasms. The persistence of the link with the inspiration of the earth allows me to venture much further beyond external reality.

 

 

The Variegated Carps Having a Good Swim in the Lotus Pond

A good honest work should attract and reflect the most secret and revealing rays of Nature. In a certain sense, Nature is only a projection of our own emotions, our own feelings. Therefore even the most impassive painter puts a little of himself into what he is doing; even a clumsy brush-stoke can reveal the inner artistic dream. But only the artist with the height of his ambition could transcribe his sensation into a work which could certainly offers the most exemplary fidelity to Nature’s spiritual requirements.

 

The sensibilities of the beauties of nature are sometimes as fleeting as the very sensation of woodland coolness itself, or the burst of warmth of a stubble field, or the whiff of a seashore, while the tenacious artist could capture them, served by an infallible sureness of hand, to translate the inspiration into art, in which all the fragments are more fertile and valiant than what we can see of the visible world.

 

Seduced by the graceful, vivacious movements and the curvilinear shape of the variegated carps, I paint them with hardly concern than to do a naturist piece. As is, the images being treated in the most realistic manner is a bit banal, nevertheless, I want to make a chase painting out of it which would render the link to the liveliness of nature and the artistic freedom to the elemental and spontaneous by rejecting the sole copy and description.

 

While in a trance so integrated in the total phenomenon of Nature, I must make an effort to obtain enough mental tension to maintain the necessary distance for creative act. For the submerged fish, the vision of their movement in the water would be the main configuration.  However the perceptual response to Nature is one thing, which is an inward inspiration, but to photograph it visibly is another. After the long and deep pondering, I resolve to depict the eyes of the fish with full spirit although that is imperceptible while object is in the motion beneath water.

 

Once the cord to string the harmonies of Nature is found, I attach to it completely, and I make it the theme of my painting. Waving their delicate fins and proceeding gracefully in a certain undulating movement, the fish are relegated to the background. For the fish are just the vivid fragments of the whole orchestration of the composed naturalness.

The Glimmering Scenery with Two Chicks in It

I always want to force myself to do something other than what I know how to do. I think it’s a transformation which hasn’t borne fruit but which will. In my works, I like to use singularly skillful and subtle procedure, to seek renewal from the direct impression of Nature as much as from a kind of poetic thoughts. 

Led harmoniously, form and colors in themselves produce poetry. Therefore everyone could feel the sensation in front of a painting that brings us to a poetic state, depending on the painter’s intellectual forces, which emanate from it.  A real master translates not only forms and colors from Nature, but also the ineffable charms repose in it. So there is some truth in Plato’s words: “How do you think he would answer if he were told that until then he has seen only ghosts, that now, before his eyes, are objects more real and closer to the truth? Would he not think that what he saw before was more real than what he is being shown?”By demonstrating the unexplored aspects of Nature, a masterpiece extends the viewers’ visions. 

Whenever I start to paint, I am sunk in the intimate and incessant contemplation of Nature, where I find everything poetic, and which is more than sufficient to start the creative impulse. The undulate margins of the lotus leaves flowing gently in the lovely cool breeze; having the curvilinear shapes, the leaves look like the springing up waves with a splash. What is more, the veins of the lotus leaf at the right moving in an upward direction is stimulating and suggestive of a kind of dynamogenic qualities, evoking moods of liveliness and effervescence which would be experience by the viewers. There is always something more elaborate artistic concerns in an idealized type of subject which is not only an orchestra, but also a diapason. 

A painting, though it is a logical construction and vigorous design, keeps something of the generalized aesthetic feeling which records the pleasure of the artist. Whenever I work, I draw with my hand, my heart with an eye toward the big confronter of my feelings: a structural completeness to embrace the forms, the atmospheric colors, the value of lines, as to render the rich, exuberant, and even florid of Nature.

The composition of this painting has been carefully contrived as to unite the relationship between surface pattern and spatial recession, an interest which I communicate with the sensibility of my own delight. I have been satisfied to make little isolated records of the delight in the details of the lotus flower and the fluff of the chicks. Especially the lotus flower is the most prominent part that I arrange the light to let it receives the highest luminosity which makes it illuminates the immediate surroundings. The flower also being treated as the gilt boss of a bas-relief is echoed with the mellow sonance of diverse glimmering tones of the chick and the leaf. The superfluous sinuosities of Nature turn into the simplified statement by a process of gradual elimination. Therefore the painting is devoid of profound distances of three dimensional spaces, though of course, by means of atmospheric color, the gradational hues of greenery, the eye may interpret these recessions as distance. 

Behind the sensual delight, that Nature herself present to our senses, is the tenet of musical principle, by which all the constituent elements are welded together so well in their union to perform the lyrical harmony and rhythms. I often manage to conceal poetry and intelligence in my works through such secondary feeling of music which strikes the deep chord in us.

A Moonlit Landscape

Having the abilities as an artist may not be a bliss, but a cursed gift.  An artist will probably live in real penury if the paintings could not match public taste well enough to mean sales.  What is more, if the artist has struck out in a stylistic way of painting which is the outcome of untiring endeavor and a tenacious desire to improve.  The repeated torment and depressing self-doubt and despondency are the real hardship. 

The qualities I value most highly in my work are individuality and originality.  I don’t want my work to lose all its freshness, therefore every work is a new departure as to explore a new expressive region and to chart the most significant technical changes from one phase of exploration to the next. 

I often get lost in my working process, and always question myself the effectiveness of my own approach of treatment.  Therefore I am frequently depressed and insecure about my art.  The painting illustrated here is an example for which I don’t know how to compose the phenomenal world with an overall visual rhythm and central thought, that I set it aside unfinished for several months.  One day, I chanced to take it out and found that it still looked charming that I really want to make the completeness of it. 

With an aim to compose a painting as lyrical as the melody of a piece of serenade, I have drawn out the poetry in a found subject.  The night, murky as it is, is nearly ripe for the conception of the day; therefore the myna and butterfly appear in the mountain scene as the harbingers of dawn which will soon break over the valley.  By choosing a downward line of sight from a high eye level, we are able to look over the tops of the mountains and see a great expanse of distant horizon beyond, and the landscape is lit by the moon on the left. 

In the painting, Nature tinctures a poetic mood and atmospherics of the moment.  The tenuity of light and its effects hang over this slice of landscape, with the smoke haze overcasting the foreground that the relationship between the viewer and the foreground is unclear, nevertheless, all the specifics in this area are rendered meticulously.  The vivid and nuanced colors of flowers and butterfly seem to be floating on the upmost surface and lure our attention to linger on them.  However the lively myna is so energetic that it captures us and leads our views further in the jumps in space from the foliage to the outcrop of cliffs and, beyond, to the dim loom of ranges and moonlit sky.

I varied my brushmarks in different areas of the painting, I do the foliage as a massed agglomerate of dabs, while the surface of the cliffs is painted in a series of criss-cross strokes which build up to a dense surface effect, and the sky is painted in a loose manner.  Compositionally, the nuancing shades of color and the modulations suggest depth without impairing the unity of impact.  In the main, the linear and physical, plastic qualities would abet the marriage of spatiality and surface structure. 

Every nuance, each visual vocabulary is orchestrated to the last detail that the completeness of a work of art often involved a struggle in it notwithstanding the seemingly effortless.

A Myna Perching Over the Lotus Pond

Every artist is an individual medium in his or her own right,clouding or refashioning the phenomena in the peculiar way or breaking them up then reconstructing them strikingly, as it were. This, in fact, is how the artist transform what is given into a work of art. In my art, my attemp is to concentrate on the states of vision and highlight the value of coupling a sense of tradition with innovation.

A slanted weeping willow is positioned diagonally from left to top right. Unconsciously, we always register a diagonal arrangment as an active, rising thing in paintings. Therefore the leaves of the willow swaying in the gentle wind seem all the more brish. This visual effect also come from the unstrained and delicate brushwork which is the basic request of the artist to master the traditional expressing skill with dexterity. The overall conception of the pictorial structure suggest my approach to deploy my effort to express the lush summer delights of the lotus pond.

As for the posture of the myna, I opted for a different angle to depict that was all the more striking for being unfamiliar. Without the moulding possible to light effect, the bird in the foreground is three-dimensional.  It is the advent of a new approach in my work. It is also an attempt to blend figures optically into their surroundings. The leaves and the bird painted in relatively subdued tones was executed with relaxed hand yet was also conspicuously exact in the draughtsmanship. The myna’s mottled black feathers recorded nuanced shades to emphasis it’s volumn, and at the same time it is the orchestration with the muted green colour surrounding it.

In the lower part of the picture. A lotus glints through the willow and thus has created an optical distance. By gradation of the changing sizes of the leaves and flowers in the pond, a certain sense of depth is added in the planar qualities of the picture.

Although no light source can be identified, the pond which is rendered as the backdrop is bright. It is because the outlines of the leaves is drawn delicately while they are adumbratively coloured with watery green to achieve the brilliant effect.

The painting combined a number of technical strategies which is an idiosyncratically tentative approach, comparing Nature with the organic pictorial image and trying to bring the two into line.

A White Swan Gliding on the Surface of the Pond

Sometimes using the artistic vocabulary in a particular sense of vision is simply whimsical. As I aim to compose the suites of paintings with the motif of lotus, the reverie of the panoramic view of lotua pond with a tapestry of leaves and flowers emerged in the rippling water extending to the distant horizon, with a white swan paddling in it always absorb me. However to bring a new project to resolution is not easy to be realized.

Without relinquishing an array of traditional brush teachniques, I had already begun by 2010 to formulate the more sophisticated approach to theme and colour that would characterize all my lotuse pictures. This group of closely related pictures is executed to pursue a kind of modern expression in search of the various possibility within the presiding theme. My lotus pictures are also my meditations on contrasting modes of artistic awareness.

The treatment of colour could be descriptive or decorative, whereas in the “A white swan gliding on the pond’s surface” is characterised both by the calculated interplay of opposing complementary tones that heighten the illusion of space and by the contrasting interplay of closely related tones with just the opposite effect. In this picture, the related tones of the bright red colour of the lotus petals on the left, with the other red one muted in the golden light stand out and interact with the complementary green tones of those leaves. The red colour punctuates the complementary green waterscape, and then the spatial plane is formed.

The third lotus is rendered with all shades of purple which was conceived first of all as a harmony to the shaded background.The dimmed colours of green, blue, purple are like visual poetic vacables with orchestrated details all being encapsulated in the decorative harmonies.

At the same time, I defined some leaves which scattered on the plane with contour lines, that resonate with the delicately depicted swan as to achieve a decorative unity. In this painting a combined efforts as to suggest a parity between the sensitivity of the voluminousness of the pond, and the invariable quality of the basic form of the lotus render the changeable nature of the lotus pond with some everlasting quality.

The calculation of every nuance is by no means impromptu. All the artistic vocabularies harmonize, blend and finish by producing something vital and fine, that people should not see so much as intuit.

The True Love In Our World

In a world of compassion,if we be callous enough to ignore all the sentience of living things, all the sentimental reasons of existences, it were as reckless a task to endeavour to annihilate perception while sense existed as to blunt the purest affection in the heart to let it fail to respond to the sincerest sighs and whisper. The insensitivity in the heart withers its vital energy, yet it still yearns for the delight of existence and the pride of life; we still desire something which can pep us up. While the heart is stricken intolerably lonely, we would have recourses to some measures ministerial to its pleasures,to its self-complacency, to the mirage of ever-increasing prosperity, trying hard to recover the ecstasy in living, yet without noticing there is something so vain and pretentious in such the arts of dissimulation and falsehood.

Some people would like to follow the bent of their inclinations. The Sun rises and sets, the day passes, and any party,any thing to fill up the day has been enough. It seems to us that in a consumer city, there is a wide variety of entertainment to make us grow enthusiastic as long as we could afford to spend money. Although the great world goes on, the party could not continue forever and eventually it has to come to an end. When the party is over, the concealed stillness in the ballroom would make us feel even more lonesome in the aftermath of the ecstatic happiness.

To seek pleasure and make merry, to get what we want to our hearts’ content are the principles of Human Nature. Besides, the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated; in such frame of mind, we perhaps have let loose a demon in our hearts unawares, and that all our actions will now be for the sake of such rewards. We would have it gratified in the pursuit of wealth and status as to glory in having the outstanding social ranks to make a parade of our powers. Therefore the participations in a variety of gatherings,cocktail receptions,dinners,etc.,become the main agenda of life. People are seeking interpersonal relationships in these venues for social intercourse to attain to the individual self-interested goals. In these occasions, it is not very difficult for a person of ordinary capacity to make an affectation of cordiality and friendliness which is not felt, and to make promises which are never intended to be performed. As our passions are not sincere and our intentions are not honorable, all these doings could not nourish our hearts.

Sima Qian of the Han Dynasty(206BC----8AD) had already summed up the mode of activities of mankind, ‘All the hustles are coming for fames; all the bustles are going for gains.’ A famous story can be read as the intrepretation of the remark of Sima Qian. On one occasion, Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty made a tour to Jiangnan in disguise. One day, he went to the Jinshan Temple which was high up in the mountain.He saw many boats going to and fro on the Yangtze River in constant streams, and asked an old monk how long he had been living here. Of course the old monk did not know that the asker was the current emperor and replied: ’I have lived here for decades.’ Qianlong asked: ‘For such long time, Can you figure out the number of boats coming and going in so many years?’ The old monk replied: ‘Only two boats altogether.’ Qianlong was surprised and asked again: ‘What does this mean? Why only two boats in decades?’ replied:’ There are only two boats in human life: one is loaded with fame; one is loaded with gain.’ We are actually all busy people, and the pursuits of profit and power engage our full attention till we die. When Time has enrolled us in the list of the departed, surely never shall the sun has shed the warmth of tenderness into our apathetic hearts, never shall we have breathed the blessed air fragrant with forest leaves and bright autumnal berries.

The volume of the heart is seemingly a limited small one, but it has an enormous embrace. What is wholeheartedness? Is it something materials—which must be taken from one to be given to another? Is it capable of no extension, no communication? We are so used to carry on the cold drear length of the anticipated prospect of life of repression, as to be insensible to the excellent power of it and never could we perceive how wonderful when it overflows with all the compassionate feelings of the world, warmth as a humanist and concern for humankind and beyond.

I have often thought it a peculiarly unlucky circumstance in duling with real duties, that though in every other situation in life putting the last ounce of pluck and strength into the pursuit of gain and power is not only the efficient, but actually by far the easiest way of proceeding, we are never under great difficulty in doing everything for its own sake, for its own merit than when the passion is the imaginative pleasure; of doing for the love of fame, for the selfish excitement of the fleeting tribute to self-interest. Therefore to my gratification, the execution of my exhibition being held at Fo Guang Yuan Gallery, all the efforts of the sincere volunteers have contributed to make the exhibition a successful one. They have left undone nothing which ought to be done to fulfil a duty.

Even the cassocked Master of the abbess there mounted the ladder to adjust the placement of the paintings being hung, to fix the lighting apparatuses so as to enhance the effect of display. And at the opening ceremony of the exhibition, Man Lan Master who officiated the ceremony, is very nice to give me a souvenir! I am deeply touched by what all they have done with the pure, simple, unsophisticated virtues of a heart which is capable of abstracting itself to observe all the duties a task ought to be fulfilled.

Replace the heart of selfishness, possessiveness with that of benevolence and kindness, and let it be the way to see others and the world; one would know that humans are large temperamentally, large enough to desire the happiness of others, to love virtue for virtue’s own loveliness, to embrace all the betterment of the world. And in the affectionate feelings, there is ever the blessed will on this side of eternity to transmit  us the bright, bounding gratefulness.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Local Scenery[2]---------Chinese painting

There is no royal road to learning. To make a methodical research of the special subject is essential; otherwise without the requiered proficiency, we do not know how to develop and evolve with good flexibility. In the painting, there are three different expressive ways to depict roses,from the clear image to the blurred impression ,and such varieties are to constitute a hormonious whole of unity. The mistiness is being established on the foundation of explicitness; or else the the whole structure well be torn to pieces.

Chinese Painting for the Elders

It is the greatest fun seeing the elders practising their Chinese paintings, and as an art instructor I really have had satisfactory time with them. It is ridiculous to deem that the senior citizens do not have such the creative imaginations that the younger persons have;or their learning capacities are inferior to that of the much younger generation. Many times, I only need to repeat what I have told them,or have taught them once, twice or thrice at most, they would said: ’Ah! Now I totally understand. Thank you teacher!’  Then they would put what they had apprehended, what they had constructed in minds on the sheets of paper with individual interpretations!

The young has a thousand activities ;Chinese painting for them is just being considered as one thing among their activities.They can be still happy without it.Any party,any thing to fill up the day has been enough. I always believe in going hard at everything, whether it is painting or musical instrument, football or basketball. For an adequate object,we have to absolutely exhaust one’s self or to take big chances. Otherwise we cannot get in the pith and morrow of it. To keep in training the faculties is of vital importance to empathize the quintessence of the adequate object with our bodies and souls. However the young generation has so many distractions that they could not explore the territory of Chinese painting in depth. Their skills and cognition regarding this subject only can be defined maybe just as the level of the amateurs’. It is the problem of some of the  younger students of mine for their making little progress,even over a long span of eight years.

   Sometimes,I like to offer a challenge to the elders as to invigorate their creative  thinking ,or  to     upgrade their depicting  techniques. At first,to my  surprise,the  more  complicated  the  subject  matter  they worked on, the more they resoluted to exert every effort to deal with it. The painting above with three chickens in it is a work by an elderly gentleman who are over 70s. He loves  challenge badly.At the end of every lessons,he would usually say: ‘ Interesting tough work! I have task to do this week.’ He told me that he had to practise repeatedly,and had to throw away many unsuccessful works,and then could have a pleasing one. Looking at three chickens gives a feeling of the artist’s geniality,a geniality made up of discretion and modesty and which is able to transpose the rural savour into pristine freshness.

   

 The other painting two chickens is a work by an elderly lady whose brushwork is much more forceful and energetic,another kind of interpretation . When she is engaged in painting,she would pause and ponder in a great while, and then wields the brush immediately and decisively on the paper. Sometimes she would cover a particular area of an object with repeated brush strokes to darken the shades.The breast of the cock in her painting was drawn with deep yellish-brown,and with dry black strokes over it, which enhanced the visual effect of feathered texture.

 It is never too late to learn,if we really learn something with great eagerness. Another elderly old lady always repeats this words: ’I don’t know how to handle the brush. I didn’t have much education for I had to support the living of family when I was eight years old.’ She did not have the chance to learn Chinese painting previously,but now she can grasp this opportunity to learn what she likes. Besides,she is making progress every time. From the group photo,we can see that my elder students are still going strong. They will showcase their works at the displaying area of Sai Wan Ho station in the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway in the coming March.