Black Ink in Guo Xi's Early Spring.

 #inktober #chinese inkpainting 

For Inktober I'm focusing on Chinese and Japanese monochrome ink paintings.

This is a cropped closeup of part of Guo Xi's Early Spring.

An European painter might have chosen to emphasize flowers and green leaves but this is early spring in northern china and the artist choose to emphasize the first signs of spring as a change in structure with branches dotted and darkened by dots and strokes of black to show emerging growth but lighter grays used to suggest a middle ground and vegetation on the upper left.

Here's all of that same work.

Again the black ink creates tone structure and texture !