Siyuan Ren Demonstrates Chinese Court Style Painting | 1, 23 & 30 August 2015

Traditionally, the materials and medium that a Chinese painting use include Chinese brushes, ink stick and ink slab, Chinese colours, bamboo, rice paper and silk. Chinese ink is traditionally made of carbon, pine black and glue, into a stick. When writing calligraphy and creating Chinese paintings, people dip the ink stick in water in the ink slab to produce the ink.

The Chinese colours looks like watercolour, but usually they are made of plant extract, instead of mineral pigment. . . . . Although colourful, they are relatively pale. An advantage of the Chinese colours is that once they are dry, they are permanent. They don’t fade like watercolours.

The structure is the skeleton of the painting. It’s brush strokes of various weight, curvature and length that form a continuous dance of expression in the paintings. . . . it shows the calligraphy skills of the artist.

“Chinese paintings often look flat compared to a western painting,” says Siyuan. “ That’s because while the western painting focuses more on the accuracy of the objective world through anatomy, texture and perspective, the oriental painting style focuses more on an individual experience and expression, subjectively. Therefore, the depth of the field is often created by white spaces. The depth of a painting is how you read it not how you see it.”

Read more about Chinese painting on Siyuan Ren's blog