The Mini Scrolls Are Teaching Me to Paint Again

I've been humbled by a piece of paper~ some brushes~ and paint~

That's the honest way to say it. I started a new series of miniature scrolls this year~ small format, Chinese and Japanese watercolor and sumi painting on traditional xuan paper and washi paper~ and somewhere in the middle of it I realized I wasn't just making new work. I was relearning how to paint~!!! 

The Scrolls Themselves

The idea is simple on paper. Small scrolls, worked slowly, no fixed count or endpoint yet~ I'm still letting this one tell me what it wants to be rather than boxing it in early. A few pieces are already finished. One I keep coming back to is an empress tree branch, purple bloom, ink and watercolor. In Chinese folklore the phoenix is said to only land where an empress tree grows. I didn't set out to paint mythology, I just wanted to paint the branch, but the story was already sitting inside the tree before I ever picked up a brush. That's usually how it goes for me~ the meaning finds the piece, not the other way around.

Several of these are painted now and not yet mounted. I still haven't fully solved that part. The making is ahead of the finishing, which feels about right for where this series is at.

Testing New Materials

Xuan paper is not watercolor paper wearing a costume. It's its own animal, and it does not forgive the way Western watercolor paper does.

Western paper lets you lift, blot, rework, second-guess. Xuan paper drinks the ink the second it touches down and it does not give it back. There's no real undo. A stroke that blooms too far blooms too far, permanently, and you either build the next stroke around that truth or you start over. I've ruined more paper this year than I have in a long time, and I mean that as a compliment to the material, not a complaint.

Same with the brushes~ traditional sumi brushes hold and release water completely differently than the flat and round brushes I trained on. Loading one properly is its own small skill. Too much water and the line spreads past where you meant it to stop. Too little and the stroke goes dry and broken halfway through, which sometimes is exactly what you want and sometimes absolutely is not. I'm still learning to tell the difference before the brush hits the page instead of after.

The Actual Learning Curve

Here's what nobody really tells you about switching traditions after years of training in another one~ your hand still remembers the old way, and it argues with you. 

Western watercolor, at least the way I learned it, is a conversation. You lay a wash, you come back, you adjust, you build up in layers until the piece agrees with you. Sumi and Chinese ink painting are closer to a decision than a conversation. The water-to-ink ratio, the stroke order, the speed, the pressure and lift of the brush~ that all gets decided before the brush ever touches the paper, because once it's down, it's down. There's a discipline to it that Western technique never asked of me in quite the same way.

I grew up around this tradition without ever being trained in it directly, which is its own strange position to paint from. It's familiar and foreign at the same time. I'll catch myself reaching for a Western fix, the reflex to lift or rework, and the paper simply won't let me. So I'm building a new instinct from scratch, at the same time as building the actual pieces, which is slower than I'd like and exactly as slow as it needs to be.

Asian painting traditions get lumped together and swept under a rug more than people realize, treated as one undifferentiated category instead of the deep, specific, technical lineage it actually is. Relearning to paint inside it, even just this small corner of it, has been its own quiet correction. Not something I need to announce or make a case for. Just something I'm doing, one small scroll at a time, one ruined sheet of xuan paper at a time, until my hand stops arguing with me.

The scrolls will get mounted eventually. The materials will stop surprising me, eventually. For now I'm just letting the paper teach me what it already knows.