notes from underground

“I’m terrible at finding the right words for things. I’m sure Tolstoy would have been able to come up with exactly the right word.” - Haruki Murakami, in Sleep, from The Elephant Vanishes.

This, of course, is read in English after being translated from the Japanese, not to mention its being a statement in Japanese about a novel (Anna Karenina, as it turns out) written originally in Russian; it is a statement, moreover, that can only fully be understood by English readers if they have read the novel in translation from the Russian (as I have). Somehow, we all understand each other. I’m impressed.

A chance look at an animation project somebody in the List MML was working on simultaneously reminded me how much I like Chinese painting and also lead me to discover more about 20th century Chinese painting. The guy who was working on that project was animating on top of an ink sketch by Wu Guanzhong, and I poked around online until I found a biography with some of his work. I like a lot of it– there is more at the following sites:

• Wu Guanzhong at Fernando Botero Art, including some more abstract works
• A painting of Wu’s at Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery
• Another webpage devoted to Wu — the bottom ink painting is the one the guy in the MML was working with.
• More Wu paintings

On a broader Chinese painting note, here is a site focused on contemporary Chinese art, and how the painting tradition has changed (I particularly like the top image, by Zao Wou-ki): Transformation of Tradition: Chinese Painting. I am beginning to seriously consider trying to track somebody down in the EAS department who would work with me on a brush painting independent study next year, both Sumi-e style and traditional Chinese. I wish I could pronounce these names, though… maybe I’ll vagabond the first few weeks of Chinese 10. Great idea, eh? ^_^

Not because it has anything directly to do with Wu Guanzhong, but because I discovered this site through searching for Wu’s painting: Song Li’s website: “Anyway, this is a personal website about what I paint, what I think and what I XXX. It’s just from an ordinary Chinese person.” He’s got some nice stuff, and I’m putting the link in this post so I can remember it.

It’s not anywhere close to digital painting in terms of the problems it presents, but a quote from this week’s New Yorker (4/9/07) brings up yet another problem with the computer vis-a-vis the creative process:

On the P.C., we use the same skills that we used on the typewriter, but the contact is not the same. We run our fingers lightly over the keys, making a gentle, pitter-patter sound. On the typewriter, by contrast, we had to stab, and the machine recorded our action with a great big clack. We liked that… The noise told us that we had accomplished something.

. . .

Which brings us to the white page. Mallarmé spoke of the uncertainty with which we face a clean sheet of paper and try, in vain, to record our thoughts on it with some precision. As long as we were feeding paper into the typewriter, this anxiety was still present to our mings, and was revealed in the pointillism of Wite-Out, or even in the dapple of letters that were darker, pressed in conficende, as opposed to the lighter ones, pressed more hesitantly. A page produced on a manual typewriter was like a record of the torture of thought.

The article goes on to note that the “effortlessly and undetectably erasable” text we produce on computers “buries the evidence of our struggle, asserting that what we said was what we thought all along.” Regardless of whether typewriters spoke to the previous generation of authors in the way the Muses spoke to Virgil, something has been lost in the departure from the tactile. This echoes my own feelings about digital painting, and how frustrating it is to work for hours on something that looks so clean and digital that surely it was done faster than that? At Siggraph I got to try a force-feedback 3D modeling tool, that let you mould CG meshes as you would with clay, to extraordinary results. Wacom tablets have adjustable heads to control the feeling of the pen against the screen. We’re moving in the right direction, but that heavy clacking sound, and its artistic analogue of the friction between loaded brush and rough canvas, are still beyond our grasp on the computer. Maybe that’s how it should be; maybe the two worlds are best kept separated. I’d hope not, though.