Waiting. Again.

Today was super frustrating. It started off ok, arrived to morning lecture and sat there in the dark looking at art. There were many ink screen paintings today, which are my favorite of Japanese art. Trees, and mountains, and mist and fog. Disparate forms, dancing and echoing. The slides were followed by a short movie, which was especially interesting as it showed professional artists at work, mixing sumi, moving the brush. They used a surprising variety of brushes, including brushes of straw and pine needles for different effects.

After lecture I went home for a little while and prepared for my later studio class. I've been trying to do more drawings while here, pencil mostly, and just sketches, but in preparation for a larger painting, I reverted to charcoal use and referenced a photo I had taken. The paper I found in the store didn't have a whole lot of tooth for charcoal, more like printmaking paper, but things like that didn't bother me as I simply adapted. I even took advantage of it, my linseed-oil prepared charcoal is somewhat hard and digs away at the surface when over worked, so I was getting some interesting stress effects and textures.

Having a charcoal drawing I was happy with, and definitely looking like I had made it, I needed to distill this into line. Or at least rough shapes to provide definition when painting. It was very difficult, somewhat frustrating, and not really necessary in the end. Mountains are indistinct, shapes blur together, areas of darkness, ares of light, gradients in between. It sent me off on a tangent, trying to distill the image into some sort of abstraction. I wasn't happy with what I came out with, and pretty much ignored it later except for the main outline.

Back at school, I transferred my image onto a prepared panel. I had done this previously, mounting my primed paper onto a borrowed wooden panel, so I was all set to go. My line drawing was all ready on some tracing paper, which I then flipped over and used some willow charcoal over all the lines, then flipped it back to the front and went over my lines again with a pencil to press the underneath carbon onto my panel. An easy transfer method, good for many things.

Thats when the problems really started. I used my sumi to start making outlines, but then when I started to darken areas of shadow, the sumi acted weird, would speckle, lay inconsistent. It didn't look very good. Still, I thought it was me, so I cleaned my suzari to make sure there were no hardened chunks, patiently remixed my sumi and tried again. Some isolated areas were fine, but the same thing kept happening. Eventually my sensei came back into the room and I asked what was going on. Turns out the paper was not primed enough, instead of the 3 coats it had gotten, needed 4 or 5 at least.

So again. More waiting. I can't paint because the materials are not primed. I couldn't prime the paper again today because it was wet with the sumi. I have just one more month of studio time here (before I'm homeless roaming around Japan). I'd like to finish two larger sized works in that time, but it's so time consuming to do it right.