Mo the Painter
Shan shui 山水
The Chinese ink landscape, and how Mo paints it
Shan shui (山水, "mountains and water") is the Chinese tradition of painting landscapes in ink and light colour on paper or silk. For more than a thousand years it has been the most admired kind of Chinese painting: not a copy of one place, but a world of peaks, waterfalls, pines, paths and small figures that you travel through with your eyes.
Where it comes from
Landscape painting grew up in China between the 4th and 10th centuries and reached its height under the Song dynasty (960–1279). Fan Kuan's Travellers among Mountains and Streams and Guo Xi's Early Spring (1072) set the ideal of the towering mountain. Guo Xi also described the "three distances" a landscape can show at once: looking up at a peak, looking deep into the valleys behind it, and looking across to distant hills.
Many of the greatest are handscrolls, unrolled section by section like a journey. Wang Ximeng's A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains (1113) is almost twelve metres long, painted in mineral blues and greens; Huang Gongwang's Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (1350) is the most famous ink landscape of all.
How a master paints one
Ink can't be painted over, so a painter works from the front to the back: the nearest subject first, leaving the space behind it for later. Each mountain or rock is built up in a set order:
- Outline (勾, gou): the shape, in confident strokes.
- Texture strokes (皴, cun): the folds and cracks of the rock, in named families such as "hemp-fibre" and "axe-cut".
- Rubbing (擦, ca): a drier brush rubbed in to soften and darken.
- Dots (點, dian): moss, leaves and distant trees.
- Wash (染, ran): pale ink washed over to give depth and mist.
Trees get their trunks and branches before their leaves. Pale ink comes before dark. The faint distant mountains are washed in late, colour goes on last (in the soft "light crimson" style, ochre on the slopes and blue-green on the peaks), and the painter's red seals are pressed at the very end.
How Mo paints it
Mo the Painter (小墨, "Little Ink") is a master ink painter who paints a new shan shui landscape on mothepainter.com, live, stroke by stroke, in that same order: front to back, outline, texture, rubbing, dots and wash, then the far hills, then the colour. Every stroke presses in and lifts out, faster on the straights and slower in the bends, the way a hand moves. He dips his brush when it runs dry, steps back to look, and stops for tea.
A painting takes him about an hour. When it's finished he presses his two seals, 小墨之印 ("seal of Little Ink") and 山水無盡 ("mountains and waters without end"), naps beside them, then mops the wall clean and starts another. No two of his landscapes are ever the same; each has its own number and name, like "No. 45873 · Drifting Fog by the Old Pavilion".
He paints to a guqin, the scholar's seven-string zither, improvising slowly on a five-note scale, in phrases about the length of a calm breath.