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Tuesday, November 08, 2016

Art Journalling - Chinese Thoughts

Recently, I have been trying out a new journal I made. With me on forced sick leave (cough, cough) and no more reruns on TV to watch, I thought I'd have a stab at filling up some of the pages with some art journalling.

Why Chinese Thoughts? There was no particular reason or rhyme to this one. I started out with the image of the mask on the left, then I thought the dragon would make a nice accompanying piece and then one thing pretty much led to another. -_-!!! Maybe chalk this one up to pure inspiration, yah? I was really just too sick to think of anything more profound than "Oh, this would look interesting like this......"

I wasn't trying to string together any profound meaning from the Chinese characters used either. The only unifying factor is probably that they all have something to do with thoughts. Thoughts that come from our dreams, from fantasies, from delusions, from other thoughts. I'm too sick to really think so I also relied on pure inspiration for this one and tried with my brush pen any character and idea that came to mind. 

Any profound thoughts? Well, that maybe I'd like to improve my Chinese brushmanship, hahaha... Some of the characters look downright ugly and clunky. My old Chinese teacher would have flunked me and made me rewrite them a hundred times. 

Also, that trying this made me think how much meaning there was in Chinese characters. A whole pantheon of cultural meaning can lie behind even one character and its placement in a piece of art. Where Western words take a few letters to be expressed, one Chinese character chosen wisely can speak volumes. All this was lost on me in my school days, of course, but now being more mature (and hopefully wiser) I can start to appreciate the finer nuances of my mother tongue.