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 ! 

INktober and Monochrome Painting

 #inktober again so lets look at monochrome paintings this month

Here's a very famous Chinese painting of a horse.

Its possible there was originally some tinting given the age of this work but black is the dominant color and it certainly shows how a Chinese brush maestro could do with a limited palette but superb mastery of ink and gradients ranging from solid darks to lighter washes and lines.

Follow me this month for more masterworks using ink!