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Zen Moment!

 

Pam notices it first.  When I arrive at her studio on Sixth Street, I’m
my normal hyperactive self, vibrating about six inches off the
floor.  After five or ten minutes she sees a change: I become quieter,
calmer, more relaxed.  That’s the effect of Chinese brush painting.

Pam has made green tea.  We sip the tea and listen to the low sounds of a bamboo flute. I sit erect at the worktable and add a few drops of water to a small, flat ink stone.  Then I begin grinding ink, rubbing a rectangular ink stick on the wet stone.  I move it in small circles, slowly, firmly, first in one direction, then the other. This is a kind of meditation, meant to prepare both the ink and the painter, calming the mind.  My breathing slows.  The water on the stone begins to darken, and after a minute or two I can feel the black ink getting thick.

A sheet of handmade rice paper is in front of me. It’s very white,
very absorbent.  I take up my brush, dip it in water, and pass it
through some of the ink on the stone.  My brush is about twelve inches long and handmade, the brush tip composed of animal hair.  The shorter hairs in the center retain the water, and the longer, outer hairs draw on that moisture and taper to form a point.  Because of its nature, this brush can "dance," making wide lines or thin, dark strokes or light, wet or dry, bold or faint, all depending on the amount of ink, the speed of your stokes and the angle of the brush.  This one brush can paint mountains or trees, bamboo or bees.

To paint a stalk of bamboo, I tilt the brush to one side, lay it on the
paper and push it upward. Then I pause, lift the brush, press down and push upward again, creating more sections of bamboo.  There’s something deeply satisfying in watching black strokes appear on white paper.  If you go too slowly the excess ink will spread to the side; too quickly and the stroke will be pale and too dry.  Once a stroke is made you can never go back over it or touch it up.  I use my whole arm, working from the shoulder.  After painting the stalk I hold the brush upright and add a dark black stroke at each joint.  Then come the smaller bamboo branches called “horn of the deer.”  Leaves are next – upright or relaxed, windblown or in the rain - depending upon my intent.  The leaf formations are called by names such as “fish tail,” “new moon” or “swallow landing.”  As the ink on the brush is used up, I can tip the brush in water, making a gray within the brush, and add lighter leaves and branches in the background.  After perhaps five minutes, I have a painting.  Two thousand years ago a Chinese man or woman may have painted the same thing, using the same tools.

As we paint, Pam offers suggestions or demonstrates a technique.
She’s particularly good at getting me to slow down, to consider the
composition, and decide where the next stroke should go.  Another thing we practice is how to “fix” a painting, drawing attention away from a flaw by adding other strokes.  She reminds me to leave enough white space around the picture, for the Chinese consider the white space just as valuable as the space covered by ink.  We discuss “brush loading” – that is, how to layer shades of gray or different colors into the brush, so that with one stroke you can show the roundness or a branch or the colors or an orchid, plum or chrysanthemum.  These last three, along with bamboo, compose the “four gentlemen” which are the traditional subjects of the Chinese painter-scholar.

I was talking to Nancy Morris yesterday, another one of Pam’s sumi-e students.   (“Sumi-e”, by the way,  is Japanese for “ink picture.”) Nancy is a massage therapist who also practices Zen and solo rowing. Like me, she had made tentative explorations into watercolor painting, liking the flow and blending of the paint but not the minutiae.  We like the fact that sumi-e requires at the same moment precision and control but also relaxation, freedom and spontaneity.  When our inner critic starts to make the strokes too tight, Pam will have us close our eyes and paint.  Always the strokes look more alive. For the Chinese, if the stokes have no life they are said to be dead.

Chinese masters first steep themselves in nature and then return to the studio to paint their impression of what they saw and remember.  They strive not necessarily for an accurate picture, but to show the essence of the subject and their feelings about it.  That’s why the Zen masters loved such painting.  For me, it’s like moving meditation - or dancing with ink.

 - Tom Walker                            back to welcome page
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