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.