IT'S OKAY FROM A DISTANCE

As a Dutchman I should be in love with colours more than patterns, especially in landscapes. And if you think of Netherlandish painting what is really outstanding are those hues in a flat plane contrasting with clouds and sky. Much of the image must remain seemingly empty.
So, not entirely surprisingly, Chinese landscapes intrigue me in a different way. Again, there is emptiness. But with a focus on pattern more than colour, and structure superimposed by the mind on what is essentially chaos. Orderly chaos. Well-regulated anarchy.

Derivative of a certain late Ching dynasty scholar, painter, calligrapher, and statesman, here is a scribble that was made with the paint programme on my computer.

It's very stylized, almost chocolate box top illustration quality.
Imagine that Brueghel was a Chinese dillettante.
A pattern of greys, blues, blobs.


There should be text on it, in handsome calligraphy, but my skill in that field is strictly juvenile, and unlike in English, Dutch, and gibberish, I am tongue-tied and don't know what to say.

I have no deep thoughts or philosophical and poetic insights that I know how to formulate in literate Chinese, and apposite quotes from Tang dynasty verse or the ancient classics refuse to come easily to mind.

Which is sad.



Also, I have forgotten the names of the brush stroke types I have so glibly faked.
I have a book somewhere which instructively describes them.
Which I cannot find right now.



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