The Versatile Master Artist

Gu Weijing took a clean brush from the brush holder, hovering it about a half-centimeter above the canvas on the easel, lightly brushing at places without paint, simulating the feeling of using the brush while painting.

”Much more refined.”

The precision in controlling the brush is the foundation of a painter’s ability to paint.

From the perspective of oil painting, all the images in a work are comprised of hundreds or thousands of brush strokes, swaths of color, and dots of pigment.

All complex techniques and clever ideas need to be expressed through a single brush in hand.

The stronger the painter’s control over the brush, the more precise and refined the strokes. Generally, the resulting image also becomes more realistic.

Even the Wild Beast School, which cares little for detail,

can have scattered brushwork, but not messy.

It can be bold, but not uncontrollable.

In the most avant-garde art, no matter how abstract or wild the strokes are, how difficult they are for the audience to understand. As long as the painter still wants to express something, the use of the brush must be controlled. No matter how unorthodox or unconventional, one cannot stray from this principle.

If you deviate, it’s not painting but child’s scribbles.

Objectively speaking, uncontrolled scribbles... such artworks do exist, some are even quite expensive.

The art market is a mix of the good and the bad, and everyone’s aesthetic needs are different. But to insist on categorizing such works as a branch of art, it would be performance art or spatial art rather than painting.

A painter who cannot use a brush well has no right to talk about artistry.

Fitz’s sketch instructor Walter had the advanced class students draw small grids with sketch pencils, training their ability to control the use of the brush.

For soft brushes like Chinese brushes or oil painting brushes to achieve precise strokes without deviation, is undoubtedly more challenging than using hard brushes like pencils or charcoal sticks.

The brush is an extension of a painter’s arm and mind, theoretically speaking.

In reality, among painters, those who can skillfully manipulate a small rotational pencil with their fingertips are already quite good.

Using soft and springy brushes made of bristles, sable, wool, squirrel, or weasel hair... for most students, it feels like a ”prosthetic”, having a layer of barrier that’s hard to overcome, making it difficult to control precisely.

To compare to ancient battlefields,

trying to split an apple perched on someone’s head in half, using a light weapon like a dagger compared to a hefty European double-handed sword, would definitely require a different level of skill.

After the Song Dynasty, masters of Chinese painting in Dongxia were often also masters of soft brush calligraphy, the reasoning is the same.

Gu Weijing, however, felt that,

if he, now at the Tier Two Professional level, were to switch to a small oil painting brush to play the small grid game,

compared to masters like Mondrian, who had an obsessive level of control where each stroke in their work achieved half-millimeter precision, there was still a long way to go.

But painting something roughly comparable wasn’t hard.

In the scenario before him, replicating ”Old Church on a Stormy Day”, the significant increase in experience points brought Gu Weijing the most noticeable change: he could now express some lines he previously couldn’t paint.

The flickering candle flames of the Old Church, in Gu Weijing’s mind, were broken down into hundreds of flowing lines.

Only by expressing as many of these colored lines on paper with the brush could he recreate the vibrant and lively light of the candle flames.

Without the foundation of brushwork skill, paint is just dead material. This is why Gu Weijing once told Miss Sakai, simply mixing paint perfectly isn’t enough.

The lively lines of the flickering candlelight were clearly before him, yet most of them were beyond his original self’s grasp; this feeling was quite disheartening.

Knowing the theory in mind, versus being able to render it on paper, are two entirely different matters.

The story of young Da Vinci taking a year to draw a smoothly outlined egg remains a story of uncertain truth.

Yet, in the real world, many ordinary people, trying to draw a circle freehand, create all sorts of oddly shaped, bumpy results.

Attempting to paint candlelight is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than an egg.

Painting simply is easy.

Haphazardly use two basic lines on a candle to form an upside-down heart, if you’re not worried about a laughingstock, this can also be called candlelight.

If you want to paint realistically enough, the only road is to constantly challenge your limits.

Gu Weijing could initially only pick out the easier lines from his mind, expressing perhaps ten to twenty percent, anything more would tangle like a mess of yarn.

Now,

he is confident that with the brush in his hand, he can reproduce fifty percent or more of those lines on paper.

Gu Weijing dipped the tip of his brush in paint, gave a slight flick of his wrist, and a mysterious and lively elegant line, like the curve of an antelope’s horn, appeared on the canvas.

His confidence surged.

”Don’t run, I’ve caught you!”

Gu Weijing looked out at the rainy night through the window once more, happily talking to himself about the elusive lines in his mind like mischievous elves, a grin of an old hunter with his rifle showing across his face.

He believed, once he captured these lines, the candlelight that seemed so ”thin” before would immediately become full and dimensional.

”Mr. Gu is generally much more mature than Gang Chang in daily conduct, yet occasionally he also shows this childlike stubborn and earnest side, quite endearing.”

Koizumi Katsuko heard Gu Weijing’s monologue and smiled softly.