Ink painting is unsparing to beginners. Brush touches paper, and instead of graceful movelings, with which you had expected to have had an easy time, there is a splat. No misty mountain. No quiet poetry. A mere slimeless, wet slop that was looking right at you as if you had insulted it. That one experience of humility is the reason why designed courses are full quickly. Learning through reading about water is similar to learning to ink paint without an instructor. Technically possible. Emotionally costly. Find more!
A good course begins precisely where the beginners really are, like frozen in the grip of a weapon, and with unmarked white paper, they are very suspicious of it. The instructors divide the brush control into the thing of reality and usability. Pressure. Speed. Knowing when ink desires to be diffused, and how to be diffused, and when withholding it. These are lessons by themselves, which absorb years to assimilate. They spend weeks within a course.
The most surprising information is the ink painting is a sport. Posture determines outcome. Breath shapes the stroke. Since the time of ancient artists brushwork has been associated with meditation and that association is not figurative, but functional. Any course worth study does so early, when students do not have to spend months of their lives accusing unsteady hands of evils that are really made at the spine.
The conversation of materials alone can be used to justify enrollment. Various inks are like animals possessed of different behavior. There are the personalities and rules of papers. It happened once that a student, not having been told that a lovely pack of costly rice paper would take the ink three times more rapidly than the customary practice papers, opened it, and in the process set fire to the entire contents in the short period of one afternoon. One of the courses dismantles these landmines silently until students walk on them.
The sequence of the lesson is by design. Bamboo before mountains. One flower in front of a complete garden. It is not coddling but the conscious elimination of failure which is unnecessary. It is not ambition to address complex compositions prior to developing a stroke control. It is a very costly method of wasting paper.
The actual shock comes in at the breakthrough. When the fundamentals are settled in earnest, the rate of development gains momentum. The brush starts listening. Ink begins cooperating. That blank paper – which has like a vacuum as its companion – becomes a something meant. Students talk about how it is a fog cleared.
There is no tutorial video that can imitate the real feedback. A person literally touching your work and informing you that your bamboo joints are too homogeneous means much more than clicking the rewind button fifteen times all by himself.
Group energy also creeps up upon individuals. Disaster with a common cause is more amusing. It is even more tangible when other people are present to notice the progress. Such group pressure brings students farther than individual effort can.