An Abstract Ink Painting Triptych, 2022
My first painting of 2022 is this triptych. It is largely abstract, so I hope you will give yourself room to see it in your own way.
I would also like to explain how I approached it. The relation between brushwork and empty space matters here, both within each sheet and across the three parts.
Before reading further, spend a moment with the whole composition. Notice where your eye goes and where it pauses. My account below is one way into the work.
Painting 1: The Left Panel
I began with the panel on the left while preparing my exhibition on the coronavirus pandemic. Living in Vienna, I am reminded of the ball season every year, although these days mostly as a spectator. The Opera Ball is only one part of it: there are balls for confectioners, hunters and many other groups. I am a poor dancer and would hardly dare ask a lady onto the floor. When I used to attend with someone, a couple of glasses of champagne helped me manage a few turns at the darker edge of the ballroom.
At the beginning of 2022, I expected the pandemic to interrupt much of that season. I wanted to bring this absence into my Corona series. In the first panel, the forms at the top suggest a dancing couple. The fiery colours carry some of the ballroom’s liveliness, while the withered flowers introduce a trace of decay. I was thinking of the flowers that decorate those rooms.
Painting 2: The Right Panel
I made the right-hand panel second. Here the suggestion of a dancer is more concentrated in the sweeping, angular brushwork. I hope the movement can be felt without a clearly drawn figure.
Painting 3: The Centre Panel
The middle panel came last. I wanted it to deepen that sense of transience while offering a quieter interval between the more active outer works.
The triptych also gives me a way to look more closely at several concerns in my painting.
New style
Over the preceding two years, I had been developing a way of working that brings Chinese calligraphy into contact with gestural expressionism, surrealism and abstraction. The technique has grown with the things I want the paintings to do.
Balance
I have discussed balance in Chinese painting before. Here I am looking for balance at several scales: in a stroke, within a panel and across the whole triptych. The unpainted areas must participate as actively as the painted ones.
That search also concerns the meeting of my different influences. My experience of Chinese painting, calligraphy, Daoism and Zen Buddhism enters into a conversation with gestural painting and asemic writing.
Opposites
Yin and yang provide one way for me to think about these relationships: dark and light, firm and yielding, a bold movement and a sensitive touch. Line and dot also answer one another. What interests me is how each changes the force of its counterpart.
Construction
In the diagram below, Fig. 1 traces a parallelogram through the painted forms, pushing toward the upper left. Fig. 3 outlines the open spaces, whose movement I read toward the right. Fig. 2 suggests an eye-shaped structure across the composition—what I think of here as the “dragon’s eye.” Fig. 4 follows a possible route through the three panels.
It is easy to look first at what has been painted. Calligraphy taught me to attend just as closely to what remains unpainted. Those intervals can connect separate marks and give them direction. They are not simply spare background; in this triptych, I want them to carry force. I explore this further in Emptiness and the Meaning of White.
I also want the viewer to be able to wander through the work. Try beginning at the lower right and following the route in Fig. 4. Some passages allow the eye to move easily; others hold it back. This relates to the movement I discuss in Four Phases in Chinese Painting.
Good writing
For me, the link with calligraphy lies in how a mark is made. A brushstroke can carry weight, hesitation or momentum before it describes anything recognisable. This is what I mean when I think of a painting as something “written.” The subject matters, but so does the life of each stroke.
Was all this planned? I began with an idea, but I did not calculate every movement. When I paint, I try to let conscious thought recede. Practice gives the hand something to draw on, much as a chemist needs a command of the tools before an unexpected result becomes useful. Afterwards, looking at what has happened can suggest the next step.
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