Reflections on Making a Painting Devoted to Leaves

One fine sunlit evening, walking home after collecting my child from school, we passed through a stand of trees. From the steps that come down the hill I looked up at the sky and caught sight, all at once, of a few leaves against the light: so grave, so weightless, so transparent, so full of mystery… I reached for my phone and recorded that moving instant.

Afterwards, merely thinking of those few leaves set something surging in me, a strong desire to make a work of them. Back in the studio I redrew their outlines in line on drawing paper, then began taking away the lines that did not matter, and after them the palest leaves, so that those lines and those leaves would take on the very colour of the sky behind and vanish together into the white.

Then I laid a sheet of chanyi (« cicada's wing », the thinnest of rice papers) of the same size over the drawing and copied the outlines across, removing once again a number of useless lines. I kept only the shapes of the leaves that were black or near-black (whether from the deep green of the leaf itself, from several leaves overlapping, or from shadow), and discarded the rest. Then, with an outlining brush (one of the Chinese brush types) dipped in pale ink, I went over the pencil lines that remained; after which I filled the black and grey leaves flat with an ink paler still, reserving the veins as white lines and some of the stalks as white too, painting certain stalks « black » as the composition required, and removing every pale green leaf altogether, letting them fall back and disappear into the white of the sky.

The next stage was to settle the values of black, grey and white across the picture, bringing out the deepest black, the middling black, the grey and the pure white. Over the deepest and the middling blacks I copied out, in pale ink, the Thousand Character Classic in small cursive by Huai Su, the Tang calligrapher, writing it over and over in layer upon layer while leaving the veins of the leaves as reserved white lines. For the grey areas I drew parallel, interwoven straight lines, pass after pass, again reserving the veins. I allowed a few leaves to stand as flat washes of pale ink; and apart from the passages that had been worked, what remained of the picture was a broad expanse of white.

A few things I learned in making this work:

1. It is one more attempt at the use of patches of « black »;

2. It continues the use of interwoven straight lines to render the greys;

3. It taught me to let go boldly of lines and surfaces that serve no purpose: in this picture I made a great many pale green leaves disappear.

The black so grave, the white so mysterious, the grey so transparent.