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Cloud Dragon Art - official website of Lisa Chakrabarti, Fine Artist

Cloud Dragon Art - Brush and Ink paintings by Lisa Chakrabarti, Fine Artist

Specializing in

Sumi-e and Chinese Brush and Ink Paintings

After a 13 year career as V.P. of Treasury and foreign currency trading for a major international bank, I embarked on a new journey in search of my 'true calling' as a fine artist. For the next ten years I worked to hone my skills in a variety of media: oils, watercolor, pastels, graphite. In 1997, a friend introduced me to Oriental ink painting, and the apparent freedom and depth of these techniques captivated my imagination—I was hooked! The discipline of Oriental brush and ink has given me a new 'voice' to create paintings that reflect my own spirit as well as honor the traditions of this ancient and much esteemed art form.

The inherent mystery, elegance and subtlety of Chinese ink painting, (sumi–e in Japanese) has made this genre my artistic passion. Combined with the idiosyncratic design of the Chinese brush, Chinese ink is ideally suited to reveal the essence and emotion that reside within even the most simple and commonplace of subjects. The brush techniques echo natural shapes and patterns which appear consistently throughout nature.

The substrates for ink paintings – Chinese xuan paper and various washi (Japanese paper) – each have distinct characteristics. This individuality contributes to the “organic” feel of my artwork and invites spontaneity in execution. My approach to painting is minimalist in the sense that I strive for purity of form through direct expression and well-tempered brush strokes.

Text Box: Ink painting dates back over 3000 years, where it was first developed in China and later found its way throughout the Orient, to Japan and Korea. Traditional ink is a mixture of soot and hide glue pressed and molded into a stick. In order to free the ink from this solid stick to use for painting, it is ground against an ‘ink stone’ - typically a piece of slate with a shallow well carved into one end for water, and a flat surface where the grinding takes place. The artist dips the end of the ink stick into the water and, with gentle pressure in a circular motion, grinds the stick against the ink stone to produce a thick, liquid ink. The ink stone is considered one of the artist’s “four treasures” — the other treasures being paper, brushes and the ink itself. Nowadays, bottled pre-mixed ink of excellent quality is readily available and eliminates the need for a special grinding surface. Nevertheless, most ink painters still are very possessive and protective of their ‘favorite’ ink stones. Ink stones range from oblong shapes of Zen-like simplicity to elaborately carved pieces featuring dragons, plum trees and other auspicious symbols. The Chinese brush is made of animal hairs, including their natural tips, often several kinds in combination, such as goat, rabbit and weasel. The brush hairs are long, flexible and floppy when wet, but will hold a shape when all the hairs are saturated with water, air bubbles tamped out, and the tip of the brush dipped into the ink. Despite all this preparation, ink painting is full of surprises. The typical Xuan paper of China and Japanese washi, usually made from mulberry pulp, are unsized. Thus, capillary action within the fibers allows the ink to spread wildly across the paper. But the challenge to control the brush and ink also affords an enormous range of technical possibilities. A single brush stroke can yield infinite shades of gray that accentuate the interplay of shadow and light, form and void. Each stroke is permanent and final: no corrections are made. In this respect, an ink painting is a window into the artist’s soul. In Asia, no differentiation of genre is made between ‘picture’ painting and calligraphy. Both are considered ‘paintings’. Calligraphy is a pictorial representation of words, and thus, meanings, but also serves as a vehicle for abstract expression. Calligraphy takes varied forms: printed, running script, and grass script (the most abstract). When an ink painting is complete, I sign my work in Chinese script and apply my seals, which I make by carving inscriptions into soapstone. The script used for seals is yet a fourth kind of calligraphy, “seal script”, based on an ancient style of Chinese writing. The seals to the left are carved in ‘seal script’ with the exception of the smallest, which is my name in Japanese Hiragana (actually it reads “Risa”, since no “L” exists in the Japanese syllabaries). — Lisa

About me...

About ink painting...

Contact: dragon@clouddragonart.com

www,clouddragonart.com: Original Brush and Ink Paintings by Lisa Chakrabarti, Fine Artist

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance

Aristotle

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In short: Don’t steal my stuff!!

The Cloud Dragon Art Website was last updated December 2009.

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