I missed my Chinese painting class this week because I was on a train to Wollongong delivering a painting to an exhibition, and today I slowly began to realise everyone else will be ahead of me now… and so I sat down to do some practice 🙂
So Monday has come a little bit late this week and I’m sharing some Chinese practice today instead. Luckily we did something quite similar last year and I also had a copy of the master’s finished work to refer to, so I managed to puzzle out more or less what I was doing. I think I probably got it in the wrong order though, which resulted in the leaves not being in quite the right place. If I’d put the branch in earlier they would have been easy to arrange around it, and you’d see more of it. It’s not far out though.
I love Chinese painting practice… while it is controlled and precise and has very deliberate techniques you also have to be bold and spontaneous (as the name suggests) with every brush stroke you make. Generally this means I spend lots more time mixing and testing paint and practising the stroke on a separate piece of paper before I commit it to the working page. And even then my heart is in my mouth when I do. But it’s so satisfying when it falls into place – and the whole process is so very therapeutic.