Essex Art Club – Jean Turton – Chinese Brush Painting

Jean Turton – Kingfisher 

I have long been fascinated by the simplicity of Chinese Brush Painting.  Jean Turton visited the Essex Art Club at the end of October to tell us about this ancient art and its materials and to give a demonstration. 

Firstly Jean told us about the Four Treasures of the Scholar’s Desk: brush, ink stone, ink and paper.  A variety of brushes were passed round,  made from various types of hair and, in one case, feathers.  The inner hairs were shorter than the outer ones so the wetted brush came to a beautiful point. The ink stone is a flat smooth surface, often beautfully carved, on which the ink, produced in stick form, is ground into a small puddle of water. The stones vary in size, including pocket sized ones for writing, with a small well to collect the ink (and sometimes a second well for water). The black ink is made from a mixture of soot and gum, either oil soot or pine soot, which can be watered down to give seven shades of grey.  There are also coloured sticks, including an orange red colour from cinnabar (mercury oxide, so poisonous) used for the traditional ‘red bamboo’ style of painting.  All the sticks were beautifully packaged with incised patterns and writing in golden characters.  The grinding of the ink on the stone is a long and laborious process and the Chinese were able to train monkeys to help them.  Finally we looked at a variety of beautiful papers.  The most basic paper was Xuan, which is made from shredded crushed bamboo and is very absorbant so any ink used has a lovely soft edge.  Variations of Xuan had gold patterns or flecks which would show through the ink of the finished work and other papers included mixed fibres, such as mulberry. Some papers and silk had been heavily sized and were less absorbant.

There are two styles of painting.  Jean demonstrated the ‘boneless’ style, which is painted with oil soot ink and recognisable for its simplicity of stroke and calligraphic style.  The absorbancy of the paper gives further free flow to the work. In the other style, ‘meticulous’, the painter inks in outlines of his subject, using pine soot ink, which are then filled in using colour.  The surfaces used for these are sized.  The boneless style required simple ‘push strokes’ which touched the paper and followed through in one motion, the brush being loosely held in the hand so it could move freely. A very different technique to the usual watercolour hold.  Once a stroke is laid down the painters do not return to touch in places where colour has been missed.  The missed patches are called either ’flying white’ or by the charming phrase ‘brush absent, spirit there’.

Jean demonstrated simple flowers for the four seasons.  Spring was white Magnolia Stellata flowers with a few leaves and simple stems.  In among the flowers she added some carefully placed dots, which the Chinese say make the picture come alive.  It was difficult to see the flowers until the end of the demonstration when she cleverly painted the background on the back of the paper.  When it was turned the right way the flowers, painted in white gouache, became visible.  Summer was two racemes of lilac Wisteria, leaves and some very twisty branches.  In among the flowers were three delightful sparrows. Jean told us about the calligraphy often added to paintings adding some calligraphic scribble plus her name, or chop, in Chinese characters.  She also stamped her own special seal in the cinnabar ink.  Autumn was a demonstration of the stems of Black Bamboo and its leaves, painted either singly or in groups of up to five at a time, in shades of black and grey.  Bamboo is painted with a specialised stroke which takes many years to truly perfect.  The Winter picture was of the stylised red petals (bracts) and green leaves of Poinsettia, with their yellow centres.  Each flower was painted in the same way, the petals in the same order, though the technique was so loose that no two flowers could be seen as identical. 

Finally Jean demonstrated a simple Chinese style back view of a striped cat, looking up at the sky and dreaming of the fishbone drawn inside the moon and also, starting with the black eyes, a panda chewing on a bamboo shoot.

Chinese brush painting is beautifully loose and seemingly effortless but we know it takes years to master.  Jean told us about the much revered painter, Fu Hua, who hid from the authorities during the Cultural Revolution and was eventually captured, but who is still executing wonderful paintings.  I may not be intending to take up this very specialised art form but I will certainly look at Chinese Brush paintings with a more informed eye in future and hope that the looseness and immediacy of brushstroke we saw demonstrated might inform my own rather too tight watercolour technique.

The Essex Art Club meets once a month. During Winter demonstrations are held on Sunday afternoons at Wanstead House, The Green, London, E18 (near Wanstead Underground Station) and in Summer there are Sunday coach outings. There are also occasional workshops. Exhibitions of members work are held both locally and in Central London.