Wednesday, 9 April 2014

Holding time in action.

There is a wonderful image of a monkey reaching for the moon in water, by the Zen poet painter Hakuin ekaku. This image comes from a different tradition and culture to the Watteau (Post 21st March) and in many ways it is far more knowing, more sophisticated in its manipulation of time and materials. Hakuin comes from a calligraphic tradition and the text that accompanies his image is an integral part, the flow of lettering echoing the flow of the drawing, one form of communication, supporting and being part of the other. This is a rough translation of the text into English, but what it misses is the way the actual shape of the letterforms works with the drawing and there is no English typographic equivalent suitable.

The monkey is reaching
For the moon in the water.
Until death overtakes him
He'll never give up.
If he'd let go the branch and
Disappear in the deep pool,
The whole world would shine
With dazzling pureness.




Time and weight compact together in this drawing to achieve a delicate communication that transcends cultures. This drawing is made using a brush and ink. Brush and ink drawings are unique as they are like a seismic record of the body movements of another human being. There is no room for error, each movement of the brush leaves a clear trace of its passage, the speed of travel recorded in the amount of ink left and the size of the mark thickening and thinning as the arm is raised and lowered above the paper.

When you mix ink using an ink stick and a graded slab you can keep the ink dark and thickly saturated with pigment at the shallow end of your slope and if you don’t stir the water the main pool of liquid remains lighter in tone as it is less saturated with ink. Now imagine this pool of ink being touched by the tip of a long soft brush, as if the monkey’s fingers were themselves about to touch that delicate liquid’s surface.  Try and hold this image in your mind’s eye.

The drawing feels as if it was started in the top right-hand corner. Dark saturated ink forms the branch from which the monkey will hang, a single twisting movement of the brush establishes the slightly gnarly quality of the wood, this is followed by a stroke carrying less saturated ink which blends into the darker liquid while wet on the surface of the support, the artist’s arm now pulling down as the lighter ink makes the monkey’s arm, then looping and slightly increasing the pressure, the monkey’s body and head are at the same time made and caught between this falling line and a new much thinner line that falls down from the monkey’s left shoulder, this finally ending in the thinnest of fine brush drawn lines as the monkey finger touches the surface of the water.  As you see this single finger touch the water, try and re-visit your mind’s eye view of the brush tip touching the ink pool.

The finger as it touches the bottom of the support indicates the lower extremity of the tall thin rectangle, this tying the image between its top and bottom edges. It also looks like an extension of the bamboo itself, the monkey and its support now blending into one.

On the right-hand side of the monkey’s hanging arm we see the faint trace of a trailing branch indicated in parallel it feels with the written text that exists on the arm’s left hand side, both text and image fall into the space, and increase our sense of holding on, the text becoming part of the thin straw of support that lies between hanging and falling. As we read the text the secondary meaning of illusion reaches us, the moon in the water fascinating the innocent monkey, its image thought of as an alternative reality.

Finally two thin curved light lines are used to indicate the body and head, just enough of a mark to establish the boundary between support and image, between abstract mark and symbolic form.

Another visit is now made to that small pool of ink; the brush tip picks out a darker pigment saturated load and spots in two childlike eyes, a nose and a few toes.

This drawing is done within seconds. The ink remains fluid at all times, each stroke blends into another, sitting into the support effortlessly as the brush leaves its traces.

This type of drawing is controlled by the elbow. The fluidity of movement comes from years of practice, the elbow moving in two plains at once, horizontally, left/right and top/bottom as well as up and down. The up-ness and down-ness controls the thickness of the brush-stroke, together with the speed of movement, which allows for either more or less pigment to be drawn from the brush. The support is always laid flat and not vertical as with an easel held drawing, the artist’s hand holding the brush in a parallel plane above the support. If you try drawing in this way it takes a while to maintain control over the elbow, because western artists tend to work from the wrist, but once you are practiced, you will find that the rhythm of movements are far more flowing and that curves and straights are much easier to establish because you are working with the natural arcs and rhythms of shoulder to elbow, rather than finger to wrist.

We know this image is about falling because it relates directly to our experience, in proportion this image is more than twice as high than it is wide, the monkey’s body dangles in space, the top of its head exactly hitting the rectangle’s central division, this key point on the one hand holding the image up and at the same time taking the weight downwards and swinging it slightly off centre as the body falls to the right of the head. This starts a rocking, swaying movement within the fall, it is animate, alive and yet gentle. The soft curves and rounded nature of these forms suggesting that this monkey is young and inexperienced, the baby-like large forehead, head body proportion and eye placement further suggesting this reading.

The artist moving the brush with calm assurance over the support, has concentrated his time, has practiced these moves in his mind and now we as observers can re-play these moves every time we look at the image. Time is held within action.

The dry ink, we know was wet, the monkey is about to touch what we know from the text is water. Will he fall into an illusion or not? Will we as observers do the same? Do we echo the body movements of the artist as we become aware of his actions? Do we, like the monkey, never give up in our attempts to grasp the ungraspable? The age of this monkey is both ageless and an infant, young and old at once, like all experiences it is fresh but quickly frozen in memory, held between thought and action.


This simple image flickers in and out of the tick-tock of the mind’s eye, if we don’t attend to the way it was made perhaps we can’t really grasp the full possibility of what it means. The stroking of liquid ink is like the gust of wind in long hair, and in that moment it is breathing and without breath the image will not live.


Patrick Ford (an ex-student who has lived for a long time in China) has commented on related issues withIn Cantonese and how time is expressed, he comments, “sometimes a single word added to a sentence changes it from the present to the future tense. For example: 'Sik fan'  = 'eat' or 'eating' becomes 'I have eaten' simply by adding 'Jor' = 'Sik jor fan'. This jor changes many sentences into the past by its presence.
There are other examples of this notational aspect - every object has a signifier, you cannot simply say '1 cup', you must use a signifier for cup = 'go'. Yat = 1, 'bui' = cup, so whereas in English we would say 'Yat bui' in fact you must say 'Yat go bui. (One round shaped thing which is a cup)
'Go' is the signifier for round things, 'Tiu' is the signifier for long, thin things (like bananas for example). Sometimes the signifier is more recognizable, such as 'Doi' = 'pair'.
We relate sounds or marks to certain, accepted meanings. The difference between the tense structure in the examples I have given is actually very small, often a single extra word, so similarly in a drawing the addition of crucial marks, specific placings or particular relationships, compositions and so on could also affect this transformation of tense.

In the case of Hakuin Ekaku’s image the fact that there are signifiers for both round things and long thin things, and that small differences can change tense awareness, means that it is possible to argue that the oscillation between action and inaction as proposed by the poem and the image structure is further reflected in the syntactical make up of the Chinese language itself.

The monkey was hanging from the tree, is different to the monkey hung from the tree. The monkey has always been hanging from the tree and will always hang from the tree is of course what the image implies. The monkey continues to hang from the tree, every time we see the image we are re-affirmed in the fact that it still hangs and long may this be the case.


See also:


More thoughts on drawing time
Drawing and time
Richard McGuire's 'Here'  Using cartoon languages to articulate complex layers of time. 








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