The Art of Ink & Brush

Knowing the vocabulary makes a painting legible. Much of what looks like generic brushwork resolves, once you know the terms, into specific choices that a trained viewer would identify immediately.

Materials and how they differ from calligraphy

The brush, ink and paper are broadly those of calligraphy, but painting adds some things. Painting brushes come in more shapes, including flat and stiff types for texture work and very soft large brushes for washes. A painter typically works with several brushes at once, and keeps some for ink and others for colour.

Surfaces matter more than beginners expect. Raw absorbent paper spreads ink and rewards speed and confidence; it suits the freehand manner. Sized paper and prepared silk hold the ink where it is put and permit slow, layered work; they suit fine-line painting. Choosing the wrong surface for the intended manner makes the work impossible rather than merely difficult.

The tones of ink

The tradition speaks of ink having five colours, which is a way of saying that dilution and density alone provide a complete tonal range. The five are conventionally named as burnt, thick, heavy, light and clear, from the densest to the most watery.

In practice a painter keeps several dilutions available and loads the brush with more than one at a time, so that a single stroke moves from dark to light as it is drawn. Learning to load a brush with a graded charge of ink is one of the fundamental skills and is not obvious from looking at results.

Control of water is the real difficulty. Too much and the stroke floods and loses its edge; too little and it goes dry and scratchy before it should. Most beginners' work fails on water control rather than on drawing.

Ink methods

Several named approaches to applying ink are standard. Breaking ink applies one tone into another while the first is still wet, so that they run together at the boundary and produce a soft transition. Accumulating ink builds up many light layers, each allowed to dry, producing a dense, complex darkness; Huang Binhong's late landscapes are the extreme case. Splashed ink applies large wet areas quickly and lets the ink find its own shapes, and is associated with the freehand manner.

These are not interchangeable. Breaking ink is quick and depends on timing; accumulating ink is slow and depends on patience; splashed ink depends on accepting what happens. A painter's manner is largely determined by which of these they rely on.

Brush handling

As in calligraphy, the brush may be held upright so the tip runs down the centre of the stroke, or tilted so it runs along one edge. The centre-tip stroke gives an even, round line and is used for outlines, for bamboo stems, for orchid leaves. The side-tip stroke gives a broad, uneven mark with a sharp edge and a ragged edge, and is used for rocks, cliffs and texture.

Painters also use the brush in ways calligraphers do not: dragging it nearly dry to produce broken texture, pressing the whole side of the brush down to make a mass, dotting with the tip, and flicking to produce grass and pine needles. The physical vocabulary is larger, but the underlying criteria are the same, and a painter with weak calligraphic line is criticised on those grounds.

Texture strokes

The technical heart of landscape painting is the repertoire of texture strokes used to render the surface of rock and earth. These are named, and the names describe what they look like.

Hemp-fibre strokes are long, soft, roughly parallel lines suggesting rounded earthy hills, associated with the southern manner. Axe-cut strokes are short, hard, angular marks made with the side of the brush, suggesting fractured rock faces, associated with the northern manner and with the Southern Song academy. Folded-band strokes turn at right angles and suggest layered horizontal rock. Rain-drop and sesame-seed strokes are dense accumulations of small marks. Mi dots are horizontal blobs used for misty wooded hills.

The point is that a texture stroke encodes both a kind of terrain and an affiliation. When a painter uses axe-cut strokes, they are saying something about geology and something about which tradition they belong to, and educated viewers read both.

Dots and washes

Small dots scattered over rocks and along outlines represent moss, distant vegetation and general texture, and they are added last. Their placement is a recognised skill; poorly placed dots look like dirt and well-placed ones consolidate a composition.

Washes are broad areas of dilute ink or colour applied with a large soft brush, used for sky, water, mist and for unifying a painting tonally. On raw paper a wash must be laid in one movement without going back. On sized silk it can be built up in many layers, and fine-line painting depends on exactly that: a traditional description of the process refers to repeated alum sizing and many successive dyeings.

Line without shading, and form without line

Two named approaches sit at opposite extremes. Plain line drawing uses ink outline alone, with no colour and no wash, and depends entirely on the quality and variation of the line. It is the most exposed technique in the tradition and is used for figures and for flowers.

Boneless painting does the opposite: forms are built from washes of ink or colour with no outline at all. The name refers to the absence of the bone, meaning the structural line. It suits flowers, fruit and soft-bodied subjects, and is technically difficult because there is nothing to correct an imprecise shape.

Colour

Traditional pigments divide into mineral and plant sources. Mineral colours — azurite blue, malachite green, cinnabar red, ochres, and gold — are opaque, permanent and expensive, and they sit on the surface. Plant colours — indigo, gamboge yellow, safflower and rouge reds — are transparent, less permanent, and sink into the surface.

The two behave differently and are used differently. Mineral colours are applied thickly for the blue-and-green landscape manner and for Buddhist painting; plant colours are used for transparent tinting over ink in the literati manner, where colour is meant to be subordinate.

Colour is also symbolically and conventionally constrained. Certain subjects have expected colourings, and a painter departing from them is making a point. The literati preference for near-monochrome is partly aesthetic and partly a claim: heavy colour was associated with professional and decorative work.

Composition

Several principles govern arrangement and they recur in all the theoretical writing. Opening and closing describes the way a composition should establish an expansion and then resolve it. Substantial and empty describes the balance between marked and unmarked areas, with the empty treated as active rather than as leftover. Dense and sparse describes the necessary variation of concentration across a surface, since evenness is considered dead.

Leaving white is the most distinctive principle. Unpainted areas represent cloud, water, snow or simply air, and they are planned first rather than left over. A common exercise is to consider the shape of the white areas as carefully as the shapes of the painted ones, exactly as in calligraphy.

Mounting, and why it is part of the technique

A Chinese painting is not finished when the painting stops. Work on absorbent paper cockles badly as it dries, and it must be backed with additional layers of paper, stretched flat, and mounted with silk borders before it can be seen properly. This is a specialist craft, and a bad mounting can ruin a good painting.

The process involves wetting the finished work thoroughly, which means the ink must be stable and the painter must have taken this into account. It also allows a degree of correction: small repairs, the flattening of blots, and the trimming of margins all happen at this stage. Mounters have historically had more influence on how paintings look than is usually acknowledged.

Remounting recurs every century or two as the backing degrades, and each remounting involves risk: paintings are trimmed, damaged areas are retouched, and inscriptions are sometimes rearranged. Any old Chinese painting you see has been through this several times, and part of what you are looking at is the accumulated result of that maintenance.

Learning from manuals

Chinese painting has a long tradition of instructional manuals that break subjects into components: how to draw a pine needle cluster, five ways to draw a rock, the correct sequence of strokes for a bamboo leaf. The best known, compiled in the seventeenth century, was reprinted continuously and is still in use.

These manuals are genuinely useful and also genuinely limiting. They transmit a repertoire efficiently and they encourage assembling paintings from standard components. Critics from the Qing onward complained that painters trained on manuals produced work that was correct and lifeless, and the complaint has force. The manuals are best used as a vocabulary rather than as a set of finished phrases.

Key points

• Ink is said to have five colours, meaning that dilution alone provides a full tonal range, and loading a brush with graded ink is a fundamental skill.
• Water control, not drawing, is where most beginners' work fails.
• Breaking, accumulating and splashing ink are distinct methods depending on timing, patience and acceptance respectively, and a painter's manner follows from which they favour.
• Texture strokes are named and encode both a kind of terrain and an affiliation to a tradition, and viewers read both.
• Mineral pigments are opaque, permanent and associated with professional and religious painting, while transparent plant colours suit the literati preference for subordinate colour.
• Unpainted areas are planned first as active shapes representing cloud, water or air, not left over at the end.