Creating Purely in Line

In the past I used straight lines, laid parallel, crossed and repeated, only for work on the theme of fishing nets. Recently I have tried applying the method to other subjects that interest me: landscape, figures, flowers, animals and more.

To make work with the simplest possible technique is at once a challenge and a pleasure. The landscape painters of the Northern Song painted with a thousand strokes, ten thousand strokes, each one utterly simple: the plain axe-cut texture stroke, the folded-ribbon stroke, the hemp-fibre stroke. By repeating them over and over they brought forth worlds of extraordinary richness and variety. The landscape of that period is a summit of creation, at which those who come after can only gaze up.

My technique of straight lines laid parallel, crossed and repeated comes out of my fishing-net paintings; it is my purest pictorial sign, and it has little connection with the traditional methods of the ancients. Tradition insists on both brush and ink. I have stripped away all the classical handling (texturing, rubbing, dotting, washing) and kept only the line: nothing but straight lines.

Whatever the subject, I begin by drawing a few contour lines: the ones that best express the subject's principal character and at the same time reveal its soul. Then I choose the relations between one contour and another, settling them into groups with a measured play of dense and sparse. Then, group by group, I fill each plane with straight lines laid parallel, crossed and repeated, until countless planes appear: blacks so dense that no air passes through them, pale planes thin and open, greys where the lines interlace only lightly, and whites where not a single stroke has been laid.

Then I hang the painting on the wall, drink my tea, smoke a cigarette, and look at it with no aim whatever and in complete ease. Where I find something fine, something beyond what I expected, I rejoice quietly to myself; where something sits badly, I take the painting down at once and adjust it. No careful calculation is needed: only intuition, freedom, no reference of any kind, nothing but a pair of free eyes.

The whole thing turns on choosing the subject and finding the few contour lines most characteristic of it. Those lines must be spare, considered, of a high order, alive with the interplay of solid and void, and they must have a direction in which they vanish, pointing straight to that state where «the words come to an end but the meaning has no end».

This stage calls for the experience accumulated over the years and for an understanding of abstraction, and then for the ruthless abandonment of all experience, all understanding, all concepts. The contours are drawn on intuition alone. One thing more: throw away everything you have known in the past, wipe out every beautiful hope for the future, forget the present moment, and simply enter the picture entirely on intuition and go on painting.

When I come across interesting material in daily life I note it down, or photograph it; but what matters most is to remember the point in it that moved me. In idle moments I look at these things and turn them over. In time, their contour lines find their way of their own accord into my paintings. This is something that happens without intention, and it has great charm.