Hello everyone, greetings from Shanghai, the sunny spring days are here in Shanghai since we arrived last Saturday. I never traveled here with John in March/April before. When we were students back then, we only came here during summer holiday. It is always around 38ºC in July/August. This time is at around 15ºC with beautiful spring weather. We could not be happier.
It is our holiday and besides that I am so happy that my friend Linda Gong Yi arranged a famous Chinese Ink Painting artist Gao Lin. Teacher Gao has many exhibitions in-outside of China. He is popular in Malaysia as well as among other Asian countries. I gained some in-depth knowledge about the formation of Chinese Ink Painting, the basic forms, the colour structure, the composition, the layout of the painting, the sequence, the material list, the history of Chinese Ink Painting, the top 4 of three dynasties’ influencial artists, the poems, the Chinese philosophy and the art of making ink painting etc. I have so many great memories of what Chinese Ink Painting contains. It is not only about techniques, it is about a country’s culture, its about philosophy and its about the context.
Master Gao is so proud of teaching this very old traditional way of painting,(guo hua, means natioal painting in Chinese). He said when you learn to paint Chinese Ink, you need to have a very good command of Chinese calligraphy as well. And when you write poems in calligraphy and stamp your name in red, then the painting can be seen as a finished work. You need to learn how to describe your feeling of the painting in a Chinese poem. You can find his work here.
Chinese painting contains “Gong Bi” and “Xie Yi”. “Gong Bi” means that you draw in very detail and true to what you see, and its very precise, you can read more about “Gong Bi” painting styles and the sample of work over here, here,and here And “Xie Yi”, which is more freehand style. You can read more about “Xie Yi” and the sample of work over here, here and here.
The workshop went so smoothly. It started with introduction of my master Gao Lin’s work and many of his exhibitions. Then he introduced many style of techniques of Ink Painting. He used to be specialized in landscape, flowers and birds. Now he switched to figure and landscape. I really enjoyed very much I have learned. Here you can see what my work in progress. Starting from Master Gao’s work “Tong Zi”, then his lesson material step by step guidance during the class and my paintings are shown below.
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