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In which Dan Chen rocks my world
Apr. 22nd, 2007 07:54 pmThe last two weeks I've been feeling really blah and flat and tired and out of sorts, for no particular reason I can pin down. Maybe I was somewhat anemic, because I felt much better after consuming a large amount of steak and spinach Friday night. Then, fortunately, some pretty cool things happened this weekend, and now I'm feeling invigorated and hoping it will carry through.
The first cool thing was on Saturday, when being at work was a lot more fun than usual because we had a two hour Stop-in-Studio by Dan Chen. Stop-in-Studio is a series of free drop-in demos that happen at the store--local artists do their thing and talk about their process for whoever shows up. Dan Chen is a local artist who is among my favorite living artists anywhere. His work carries the sensibilities of his training in China--craftsmanship, lush colors, aesthetic subjects, meticulously observed and rendered detail--but infuses it with incredible life and dynamism. He is particularly good at animals--gorgeous but never prettified, they crackle off the page with power. He not only works in oil pastel and oil paints, but also does fantastic sculptures in clay and bronze. Saturday he demonstrated a more traditional style of Chinese painting than I had seen him do before, looser sumi-style brush painting with ink and Chinese watercolor.
Dan is one of those people who just has talent oozing out of every pore. He is also incredibly friendly, unpretentious, and laid-back. His response to the group of 50 people (an unusually high turnout for us) eagerly awaiting his presentation was, "Hi! What you wanna do? I'm easy. You want to see flowers? Okay." He whips out a pad of sumi paper, a brush, some ink, and a few tubes of paint and starts knocking off jaw-droppingly beautiful flowers. The audience was literally going "ooh! ahh!" every time he held up a finished sheet.
I have tried that type of brush painting. It looks easy--it ain't. There is no going back, no cover ups, and you have to work quickly on the soft unsized paper because the ink immediately bleeds. You have to have both a pre-formed intention and the confidence to work with speed and follow serendipity. Dan demonstrated that in spades. It's like that saying about baseball: pitching is simple, but not easy. Brush paintings are simple--three sharp black smears of ink to indicate a gnarled cherry branch, the brush twisted and dragged so that it marks unevenly to depict rough bark; quick touches of pink for flower petals, pressing harder where the color should be darkest, a few dots of yellow... simple. Not easy. Then he whips off a couple goldfish--a few streaks of filmy gray for fins and vibrant red caps floating on the white sheet. Breathtaking. Simple.
He also passed around a portfolio of some of his more formal Chinese-style paintings on silk. The silk is a gorgeous warm tan, either tussah or dyed to that color, which is stretched on a panel and sized with hide glue and alum. The design is outlined in ink--selectively; some areas of the picture are not outlined, so that they look softer and recede--and then rendered in many layers of chinese watercolor (hide glue-based and more opaque than western watercolor). White mixed into the colors makes layers really pop on the colored ground; glowing figures advance and recede on the flatness of the minimal background. The diffraction of the translucent silk creates an incredible luminosity of color that changes depending on the angle viewed. The pieces in the photos were astonishingly rich and detailed--especially a giant commission of peacocks (feathers intricately delineated) and wisteria (blossoms likewise)--with the mouthwatering color intensity and saturation of a Tiffany window: they are literally that rich, glowing, and detailed.
I found these pieces quite interesting in that on the surface, they looked quite traditionally Chinese in subject, materials, and execution. But then the more you look at them, the more complexity they take on, because the Chinese approach is infused with a Western sensibility of rendering--more dimensional, somehow, the figures popping off the flat background as if about to break free. In fact it is almost exactly like the work of Giuseppe Castiglione, a 17th c. Jesuit painter who went to live in the court of the Qianlong Emperor (his portrait of the Emperor is widely reproduced) and produced works in Chinese style and subject matter yet with the subtle infusion of western realism. Quite different from the other stuff I've seen Dan do, which is figural but more obviously modern.
It was interesting to hear him talk about working for a porcelain factory in China when he was younger, how they had to be able to hand-paint two perfectly parallel lines around a vase, how they went out and painted flowers from life--he would travel hours on the bus to study a specimen, or use a giant lotus leaf as a rain hat while he painted the lotus flower, then get down in the water to see how the flower looked from underneath. He said they would spend hours unloading kilns and then still be expected to perfectly steady their hands to paint. So few western artists get that kind of serious technical training in draftsmanship and observation; the discipline really shows in both his skill and his extremely prolific output.
Several people in the audience had studied this type of brush painting and were lapping up the technical details with an eager desperation I well recognize. One of them said to me later, "It's so hard to find this information, you have to hunt everywhere--I sure wish I'd been able to talk to him years ago--" I nodded in perfect understanding--having faced the same scarcity and hungry hunt over the years for information about medieval painting, pouncing upon anyone who might guide me.
I got some information for the store's paint buyer about the Chinese watercolors they are all using, which they currently have to order from SF or Seattle; it would be cool if we could carry those at the store--the fanatics in the audience were quite excited by the possibility--and I'd like to try them myself. It sounds like the type of paint used in Tibetan thangka painting as well (distemper, technically, as opposed to tempera).
The only slightly exasperating thing about Dan is that he's one of those artists who's such a natural that he's not always very good at explaining how he does what he does. "Well, you just take your brush, and you do this..." Uh huh. No, Dan, YOU do that; we do a blob. But that's okay. Just watching him work is inspiring enough... It was a total artgasm.
Absolutely one of the best things about my job is that I am getting to know a lot of the professional artists and art teachers in Eugene. I really value that--being able to chat, ask them questions, help them find stuff, and sometimes even turn them on to new materials and resources.
I wish I had a better example of Dan's work. The trout do not excite me as much as most of his subjects, but this is the only color pic of his I can find online:
http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/adc/10100364A~Trout-Gathering-Posters.jpg
And here is a line drawing of one of his peacocks, but it doesn't begin to convey the color version...
http://uobookstore.com/art/studios.cfm
The first cool thing was on Saturday, when being at work was a lot more fun than usual because we had a two hour Stop-in-Studio by Dan Chen. Stop-in-Studio is a series of free drop-in demos that happen at the store--local artists do their thing and talk about their process for whoever shows up. Dan Chen is a local artist who is among my favorite living artists anywhere. His work carries the sensibilities of his training in China--craftsmanship, lush colors, aesthetic subjects, meticulously observed and rendered detail--but infuses it with incredible life and dynamism. He is particularly good at animals--gorgeous but never prettified, they crackle off the page with power. He not only works in oil pastel and oil paints, but also does fantastic sculptures in clay and bronze. Saturday he demonstrated a more traditional style of Chinese painting than I had seen him do before, looser sumi-style brush painting with ink and Chinese watercolor.
Dan is one of those people who just has talent oozing out of every pore. He is also incredibly friendly, unpretentious, and laid-back. His response to the group of 50 people (an unusually high turnout for us) eagerly awaiting his presentation was, "Hi! What you wanna do? I'm easy. You want to see flowers? Okay." He whips out a pad of sumi paper, a brush, some ink, and a few tubes of paint and starts knocking off jaw-droppingly beautiful flowers. The audience was literally going "ooh! ahh!" every time he held up a finished sheet.
I have tried that type of brush painting. It looks easy--it ain't. There is no going back, no cover ups, and you have to work quickly on the soft unsized paper because the ink immediately bleeds. You have to have both a pre-formed intention and the confidence to work with speed and follow serendipity. Dan demonstrated that in spades. It's like that saying about baseball: pitching is simple, but not easy. Brush paintings are simple--three sharp black smears of ink to indicate a gnarled cherry branch, the brush twisted and dragged so that it marks unevenly to depict rough bark; quick touches of pink for flower petals, pressing harder where the color should be darkest, a few dots of yellow... simple. Not easy. Then he whips off a couple goldfish--a few streaks of filmy gray for fins and vibrant red caps floating on the white sheet. Breathtaking. Simple.
He also passed around a portfolio of some of his more formal Chinese-style paintings on silk. The silk is a gorgeous warm tan, either tussah or dyed to that color, which is stretched on a panel and sized with hide glue and alum. The design is outlined in ink--selectively; some areas of the picture are not outlined, so that they look softer and recede--and then rendered in many layers of chinese watercolor (hide glue-based and more opaque than western watercolor). White mixed into the colors makes layers really pop on the colored ground; glowing figures advance and recede on the flatness of the minimal background. The diffraction of the translucent silk creates an incredible luminosity of color that changes depending on the angle viewed. The pieces in the photos were astonishingly rich and detailed--especially a giant commission of peacocks (feathers intricately delineated) and wisteria (blossoms likewise)--with the mouthwatering color intensity and saturation of a Tiffany window: they are literally that rich, glowing, and detailed.
I found these pieces quite interesting in that on the surface, they looked quite traditionally Chinese in subject, materials, and execution. But then the more you look at them, the more complexity they take on, because the Chinese approach is infused with a Western sensibility of rendering--more dimensional, somehow, the figures popping off the flat background as if about to break free. In fact it is almost exactly like the work of Giuseppe Castiglione, a 17th c. Jesuit painter who went to live in the court of the Qianlong Emperor (his portrait of the Emperor is widely reproduced) and produced works in Chinese style and subject matter yet with the subtle infusion of western realism. Quite different from the other stuff I've seen Dan do, which is figural but more obviously modern.
It was interesting to hear him talk about working for a porcelain factory in China when he was younger, how they had to be able to hand-paint two perfectly parallel lines around a vase, how they went out and painted flowers from life--he would travel hours on the bus to study a specimen, or use a giant lotus leaf as a rain hat while he painted the lotus flower, then get down in the water to see how the flower looked from underneath. He said they would spend hours unloading kilns and then still be expected to perfectly steady their hands to paint. So few western artists get that kind of serious technical training in draftsmanship and observation; the discipline really shows in both his skill and his extremely prolific output.
Several people in the audience had studied this type of brush painting and were lapping up the technical details with an eager desperation I well recognize. One of them said to me later, "It's so hard to find this information, you have to hunt everywhere--I sure wish I'd been able to talk to him years ago--" I nodded in perfect understanding--having faced the same scarcity and hungry hunt over the years for information about medieval painting, pouncing upon anyone who might guide me.
I got some information for the store's paint buyer about the Chinese watercolors they are all using, which they currently have to order from SF or Seattle; it would be cool if we could carry those at the store--the fanatics in the audience were quite excited by the possibility--and I'd like to try them myself. It sounds like the type of paint used in Tibetan thangka painting as well (distemper, technically, as opposed to tempera).
The only slightly exasperating thing about Dan is that he's one of those artists who's such a natural that he's not always very good at explaining how he does what he does. "Well, you just take your brush, and you do this..." Uh huh. No, Dan, YOU do that; we do a blob. But that's okay. Just watching him work is inspiring enough... It was a total artgasm.
Absolutely one of the best things about my job is that I am getting to know a lot of the professional artists and art teachers in Eugene. I really value that--being able to chat, ask them questions, help them find stuff, and sometimes even turn them on to new materials and resources.
I wish I had a better example of Dan's work. The trout do not excite me as much as most of his subjects, but this is the only color pic of his I can find online:
http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/adc/10100364A~Trout-Gathering-Posters.jpg
And here is a line drawing of one of his peacocks, but it doesn't begin to convey the color version...
http://uobookstore.com/art/studios.cfm
