Introduction to Chinese Landscape Painting
1979 seems some time ago, but it was the year I attended Portsmouth College of Art and spent one year in foundation learning to draw and then two years specialising in Graphic Design. As part of the specialisation final year, we had to write a dissertation; our subject could be absolutely anything. A close colleague wrote his on ‘Bricks’, and I opted for ‘Chinese Landscape Painting’.
I served twelve years in the Royal Navy, joining at fifteen in 1964. During that time, I was fortunate to be drafted onto two ships that served commissions in the Far East, HMS Kent during 1966/7 and HMS Argonaut 1974/75. During these trips, I first savoured the culture of the Orient. During my time at Art College, some ten years later, I was forever loaning out books on Chinese Art and thoroughly enjoyed writing my dissertation.
Now, some forty years later, I find myself embarking on my very first Chinese Landscape painting; I invite you to join me on a journey, one that reaches way back into the hearts and minds of the ancient Chinese painters, poets, calligraphers, and sages but also a journey which anticipates a voyage of creativity, discovery and a vast scape of new perspectives, live each moment with me, step into Eternity. Life can only be lived in this moment, so let us concentrate our minds, listen to the Masters and open our hearts to a new way of living and seeing.
Primal emptiness separated into heaven and earth. That’s how it all began. Before long, two dragons emerged from Bright-Prosperity Mountain: Root-Breath and Lady She-Voice. Now, dragons in ancient China embodied the tremendous force of change. A dragon was in constant transformation, writhing through all creation and all destruction, shaping itself into the ten thousand things tumbling through their traceless transformations.
© David Hinton … from his introduction to I Ching. FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX New York)
Embryonic China
(Traditional accounts of Chinese history customarily describe certain ancient rulers such as the Yellow Emperor or Yao and Shun, paragons of virtue and wisdom, who first taught the arts of civilisation to the Chinese people. However, scholars now agree that these figures were originally local deities.
(BurtonWatson, Introduction to Tao Te Ching© 1993 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.)
These were mystical, mythical and magical days; dragons were all powerful, and the earth was alive with geological moulding, heaven and earth, Absence and Presence. Earth was shaped by the mysterious powers of heaven, mists, winds, rain, snow, ice and eventually floods.
(After the floodwaters drained away, the Xia Dynasty arose, about which little is known, followed by the Shang Dynasty (1766-1040 B.C.E.). In the Shang theocratic worldview, all things were created and controlled by Shang Ti (“Celestial Lord”), an all powerful monotheistic deity not unlike the Judeo-Christian God. Events could also be influenced by dead ancestors who were all-powerful in the spirit world.
© David Hinton … from his introduction to I Ching. FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX New York)
Awakened Cosmos
In his publication ‘Awakened Cosmos – The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry’, David Hinton describes the birth of our wonderful planet. It is a beautiful story of evolution from a primordial plasma of subatomic particles, atom cloud formation, pressure, heat and fusion, giving birth to stars! And with those stars, the elementary dimensions of consciousness: space, light and the visible.
In the furnace of their old age and explosive deaths, the stars grew old and formed nebular clouds that condensed into new stars. David describes ‘the heartbeat of the Cosmos, this steady pulse
of stellar birth and death, gravity’s long swell and rhythm of absence and presence, presence and absence. Our planet was formed in the third star generation, rich in those heavy elements.’
Awakened Cosmos – The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry, Shambhala Publications, Inc., 4720 Walnut Street, Boulder, Colorado 803301, www.shambhala.com © 2019 David Hinton.
Existence Tissue
David goes on to explain … “that although ancient Chinese poets and philosophers didn’t describe it in these scientific terms, this same sense of consciousness as the Cosmos open to itself was an operating assumption for them though perhaps here existence is a better word than Cosmos, as it suggests the sense of all reality as a single tissue.
Photograph ‘Touching The Cosmos‘ © Richard Lines
This existence tissue is the central concern of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (sixth-century B.C.E.) – the seminal work in Taoism, the spiritual branch of Chinese philosophy that eventually evolved into Ch’an Buddhism. Lao Tzu called that existence-tissue Tao originally meant “Way” as a road or pathway. But Lao Tzu used it to describe the empirical Cosmos as a single living tissue that is inexplicably generative – and so female in its very nature.”
David later states, “At its deepest level, the tissue of Tao is described by that cosmology in terms of two fundamental elements: Absence and Presence. Presence is simply the empirical universe, the ten thousand things in constant transformation, and Absence is the generative void from which the ever changing realm of Presence perpetually emerges. And so, Tao is the production process through which all things arise and pass away – Absence burgeoning into the remarkable transformation of Presence.
In a Chinese landscape painting, all the space – mist and cloud, sky, lake, water, etc. – depicts Absence, the generative emptiness from which the landscape elements (Presence) are seemingly just emerging into existence or half vanished back into the emptiness.”
… “Absence and Presence are different ways of seeing Tao: either as a single formless tissue that is somehow always generative or as that tissue in its ten thousand distinct and always changing forms”.
Much of what I have touched on above is covered in this link to ‘The Tao of Painting’ by David Hinton, published in Art in America on October 1st 2018 … enjoy!