Reflections on a Painting Made from Life in Hunan

This work was painted from life in early 2018. I was living then in a village in Hunan, going out every day to paint, and had accumulated several dozen pictures. One afternoon the rain came down without warning. At a square table on the second floor I pulled out a sheet of xuan paper at random and began, with no purpose at all, to paint the view outside the door. The wall and the door frame cut off any wide view of the landscape; I thought nothing of the sheet, and did not consider it a finished work.

Later I carried the batch of paintings back to Nanjing and all but forgot this one, since it did not matter in the least. When I sent the batch out to be backed and mounted, had I known it was among them I would have pulled it out without a second thought; it was not worth the cost of mounting. And then I saw it, mounted and finished. Ah! How startlingly beautiful! A breath of fresh wind laden with rain came straight off the paper. Quite unbelievable. The brushwork is loose and offhand in the extreme, the ink fresher and freer still, with no rule to speak of and no procedure at all. How did I ever paint it? And why could I not see it then? At the time I had no answer to my own question.

After several years of growth and reflection, I have arrived at a few answers.

First: because of the rain I could not go out to paint as freely as before, and I felt a certain anxiety. Then I simply let it go; it no longer mattered. I still wanted to paint, so I painted. Good or bad made no difference; a bad painting would be perfectly normal, given the circumstances. With that thought in mind I carried no burden at all, and painted without haste or strain.

Second: it broke my habits of painting outdoors. Normally I would carry a drawing board, with brush, ink, paper and inkstone slung over my shoulder; I would stop before something that interested me, lay out my materials, sit down on the ground and set to with passion and rigour. Work made that way is foreseen and demanded in advance, complete and exact: I could bring into the picture things not visible from where I sat, and delete things that were.

Shut up on the second floor, my field of vision was cut down, I could only look out through the door; the view was fragmentary, and much of the scene I could see only in part or not at all. The discomfort of it made me uneasy. But the desire to paint was there, so I painted half of what I could see and half of what I could not, mixing the actual with the imagined; and carrying the relaxed conviction that a failure would be no great matter, I was free of constraint, free of the order, the steps and the habits of my usual outdoor practice. That is how this work came to be.

As for failing to see its qualities at the time, I believe many artists have known this, and it is entirely normal. If an answer must be given, then in short: the hand outruns the eye. My learning and my sense of beauty had not yet caught up.