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Following a delicious dinner at their home, Mr. Xu began to demonstrate his painting prowess, painting a scene of a bamboo forest in inks.
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Rose captured the whole painting process on camera, posing questions as Mr. Xu began by painting the leaves of the bamboo, followed by the stalks and bamboo trunks, adding the early young shoots of new growth and forest floor before finishing the art work with a short poem and dedicating the painting to Rose.
Mr. Xu commented that before beginning his paintings, he has a clear mental image of the final, finished work. He explained that although on this occasion he began with the bamboo leaves, the artist can begin with the trunks or other images first, it’s up to the individual artist.
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He said that as an aspiring artist, first beginning his studies, his teachers had a variety of different pieces of advice as to how to develop his techniques.
Some teachers advocated first copying the teacher’s own techniques and trying to replicate the same results, others advised going out and studying nature, analyzing how the natural plants grew and twisted around each other and how the knots and stalks appear, the spaces between them, how when the wind blows the leaves sway and the appearance of windswept foliage.
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After studying nature, the student artist would again be advised to spend many, many hours reproducing the same views and images seen in nature on paper. ?
Mr. Xu commented that to reach a level where it appears the artist just makes a few “swishes and dots” on the paper to manifest a lifelike scene, required years of refining and honing one’s skills and spending time developing one’s own style and look.
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Rather like the martial artist who practices 10,000 repetitions of their form, the artist must spend the same time painting and practicing until the result appears natural and effortless.
He said nowadays many budding young artists are not keen to spend this amount of “gongfu” or time and effort to lay the foundations of their techniques and skills, but without it one cannot truly foster this expertise.
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It was really a delight to watch a master at work and witness the blank canvas slowly come to life, filling and building into a beautiful work of art.
Thank you to Mr. Xu and his family for their generosity, it was a wonderful and unique experience and one that we will always treasure.
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Rose will be interviewing Mr. Xu in more depth at a later date, also asking Mr. Xu to offer advice to other artists keen to develop their skills and techniques.
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