Jungle Fire (Finished!)

Jungle Fire,  Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper, 8"h x 10"w, 2013 #40

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Just a very quick update on this piece which I have dragged along for almost a year, and finally finished during this weekend. No, I have actually not procrastinated on it -- some pieces come easier than the others, but this is not one of them. I would layer another wash on it every now and then, and look at it after a couple of days, feeling it still needed something -- slight adjustment of color temperatures, a little detail to modify the jagged edges left by masking fluid, etc. And finally, when I am looking at it today, I realized IT IS DONE. 

When I first started painting I never thought finish a piece is this much work and involves this much pondering -- I would select a good reference photo and when the painting looks quite like the photo I know it is done. But the more I paint, the more I realize it is the artist's aesthetics instead of the snap of a camera should dictate when and how a particular painting is finished. It can be as sketch or realistically detailed as you, the artist, is happy for it to be. The line between a finished painting and one not quite yet suddenly becomes much more blurred.

Sometimes I only realized a painting has passed its finishing point after I have put a couple more strokes and realized I just overworked it. ("An artist knows an awful lot -- but he only knows it afterwards", says the all-wise Paul Klee.) Sometimes I think it is done and frame the painting, only to take it out later for further adjustments. There is not an iron-cast standard, but more of a feeling that different layers and strokes are finally coming together into a beautiful, coherent whole, a melody instead of a collection of music notes.

Hopefully, as I continue working, one day the blurred line would become clear again...

How do you, my artist friends, decide that a painting you have labored over is done?

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Storm Over Estuary (DPW Sky Challenge)

This is a little test of landscape I've posted on my facebook page (with a terrible image taken by the iphone camera in a hurry just after I finished it) and I never got around to share on my blog, or upload to my Daily Paintworks Page. The painting was done completely wet in wet, as a test of the Fabriano Blocco per Artisti paper I recently purchased. The surface of this paper is more similar to the laid instead of woven patterns (which is the most prominent surface pattern of contemporary watercolor paper), The lovely laid pattern gives it a very antique look, as this is the surface pattern of most of the paper in the age of Cotman or Turner. Layer on this paper, or repeated wetting, has proven to be extremely difficult. Like all Fabriano paper I have tried, it lifts like crazy. But the granulating colors separate and diffuse beautifully on it, and created this glowing orange (of Burnt Sienna) along the horizon and in the light passage in the land -- a river channel reflecting the setting sun. (The photo here, unfortunately, does not show the subtle, low saturation color in the original painting.) I am submitting it to this weeks DPW challenge -- paint a sky. John Sell Cotman has said "a sky a day" is a great exercise in watercolor painting, since it is always there for you to observe. This one is painted looking at the lovely back waters of San Carlos.

Storm over Estuary, 

Watercolor on Fabriano Blocco Per Artisti140# Cold Press Paper,5"h x 7"w, 2012 #51

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Beauty Queen (DPW Challenge Entry, and a Little Personal Thoughts)

As I was finishing this piece, suddenly a sense of familiarity stroke -- it felt as if I had drawn it, painted it before, as if we had met as old friends, comfortable with each other. I stopped my brush and sat for a while, trying to figure out where this sense has come from. Then I started to remember -- the garden outside my window when I was living and studying in Indiana, which was always blooming with a thousand pink, aromatic roses just like this one by the end of summer. I had gazed at them many, many, many times in the clear, cool breeze of dawn,  thinking about putting them down on paper, which I did not think I could do at that time -- a seed of dream planted a long time ago, to be waken at this moment.

Beauty Queen, Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper, 7"h x 5"w, 2012 #41

Sold!

Submitted as DPW Challenge Entry (Rose Challenge)

Indiana was the first place I landed when came to this foreign country to finish my graduate study, a very different place, sharply contrasting to where I grew up -- the never night city of twenty million, Shanghai. Living in Indiana means dealing with life so intimately interwoven with nature -- the whole intermeshing of plant and landscape, of sky and earth, of time and place. Nature was always there where I lived, just down the front steps of the doorway, made of native limestone with tiny fossilized shells embedded in it, along the riverbank that overflows in the summer, in the scarcely-pruned garden filled with native wildflowers of my neighbors... And there was always time, lovely time, to notice the world around, time to relate to it in my own way, time that seems to be in shorter and shorter supply each year now. I wonder if I had studied and therefore stayed at other schools in other places, whether I would end up where I am right now, painting the same thing -- flowers of summer gardens, landscapes with horizons stretching to the sky -- or would I even be painting at all? I honestly don't know, but I remember the kind, patient, guiding hands of my first watercolor teachers, extraordinary artists living their entire life in small town Indiana, not at all interested in the hustle and bustle of the outside world... 

A sense of sweet nostalgia slowly enveloped me. I took comfort in knowing that the way I learned to look at the world about me then and there was the same practice I am taking to observe the world about me now. I came to a western landscape as an outsider looking in, and the reason I could do so is because years ago, in Indiana, I had learned how to be an insider looking out...