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Rock, mountain, water, and tree grow in many stages, through many layers of ink, to become a finished landscape painting. The four chief stages in this process of growth are, first, the outlines; second, the shaping lines; and finally, in either order, the washes and the dots. These stages often merge indistinguishably into each other and, depending upon the artist and his intentions, may also include certain subsidiary stages. The outlines are the beginning of the structure. They can be superimposed over each other in several layers of ink, either in lighter ink first and then heavier, or the other way round.
The two accompanying figures provide examples of graphic contrast of the light and heavy outlines; Fig. 8 shows light outlines plus many shaping lines. If the outlines are first put in with a lighter ink, then it is possible to make changes or corrections when applying the second layer. The transition from outlines in lighter ink to shaping lines is not so noticeable or so dramatic as the transition from heavy-ink outlines to shaping lines. In applying a first layer of light-ink outlines there is a tendency to render them in the washlike strokes of a kind often used for shaping lines; the danger here is that the forms will remain flat and lack contrast, thereby giving a sketchy impression.
Outlines which are put in first in heavier ink (Fig. 9) make corrections or changes practically impossible. Therefore it requires greater skill to begin with the heavier ink, particularly since the characteristics of the outlines decide the style of the whole picture. The outlines merge into the shaping lines unnoticeably and without any gradations. However, to distinguish between the two, it can be said that the outlines are usually the longer components, while the shaping lines are mostly put together out of shorter single components.
The untrained eye will scarcely be able to tell the difference between outlines started in heavier or lighter ink. This may be quite irrelevant, and it may seem unimportant to distinguish between them. Actually though, just such apparently unimportant differences occur throughout the whole of Chinese painting; and the quality and genuineness of any work can only be judged by someone who has been trained to recognize them. Unless considerations of style demand a different approach, a master painter will usually begin his original painting with heavier outlines. But the imitator, or the forger, both following the same original, will begin with light ink so they can make corrections as they go along and later put in the decisive shapes with heavier ink.
In Figs. 10 and 11, a superficial examination will fail to reveal in which order the inks were applied. Closer examination, however, reveals certain distinguishing characteristics. Putting on the heavier ink first, as in Fig. 10, tends to give a stronger, harder, more linear effect, and a clear gradation between outline and shaping line is noticeable. When the lighter ink is put on first, as in Fig. 11, the painting becomes generally softer and suggests an immediate transition to a wash. Of course this latter example also contains shaping lines, but they are not so clear as in the first example.
From the above, it becomes evident that the artist's choice of light or dark ink for his outlines—or for any other area—has nothing to do with questions of light and shade, of chiaroscuro effects. Their use is based on an entirely different principle: that of balancing the light and the heavy, the advancing and the retreating, the acting and the reacting. The arrangement of the forms passes beyond the sphere of plastic composition into aesthetics, where we meet once again the principle of the identity or balance of opposites.
Shaping lines constitute the most important element of Chinese landscape painting. In them the collective experience of the Chinese painting tradition and of the individuality of the painter are most purely expressed. One is tempted to say, in modification of Buffon's dictum, "Le style est l'homme même": The style is the ts'un.
Shaping lines can either follow strictly traditional rules or express the highly personal conception of an individual master, but the more frequent case is a mixture of traditional and personal qualities. The painter inevitably expresses his own personality in his shaping lines, even when trying most painstakingly to copy the shaping lines of a great master. The process is comparable to an attempt to copy another person's handwriting and, in doing so, leaving certain clues which a trained graphologist could recognize. These clues would be the involuntary expression of the copier's own personality. To carry this figure of speech a bit further, it can be said that one has to examine the brushwork of a master with the precision of a graphologist in order to ascertain a picture's genuineness. Only by equally thorough means can one judge the work of a master beyond any shadow of doubt or distinguish between a copy and the original, a late work and an early one, a master and an epigone. If so many spurious paintings are to be found in our museums, and if paintings ascribed to old masters have recently so often been re-evaluated as belonging to later periods, this results from the fact that hardly anyone, so far, has bothered to provide the tools for a critical analysis of brushwork.
When a painter aims at producing an original composition rather than at reproducing an earlier style, he will deliberately or instinctively adapt the traditional shaping lines to his own use. Or he will effect a new combination of accepted shaping lines of a similar kind. Or, finally, he will create variations of his own in which the original shapes will be hardly recognizable. The Chinese traditionally distinguished sixteen or more kinds of shaping lines, not counting the subsidiary kinds. These were conveniently divided into three large categories by the Japanese art historian Kimbara Shōgo: thread-shaped lines, band-shaped lines, and dot-shaped lines. Benjamin March, in his useful little book Some Technical Terms of Chinese Painting, adopted these three categories and added a few minor kinds of lines to produce the following list (given here in a somewhat different order from the one he used):
A) Thread-shaped lines:
1) Luan ma ts'un: shaping lines like tangled hemp stalks. Also called luan ch'ai ts'un: shaping lines like tangled bundles of brushwood.
2) Ho yeh ts'un: like the veins of lotus leaves.
3) Chieh so ts'un: like unraveled hemp rope.
4) P'i ma ts'un: like spread-out hemp fibers.
5) Ma p'i ts'un: like a tangled ball of hemp fibers.
6) Luanyün ts'un: like rolling billows of cloud.
7) Niu mao ts'un: like cow hair.
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