From Realism to Abstraction

Most of us artists start as realists.  We soon find our own style and ways of rendering our artworks and develop towards our inner bank of unknown surprises.
I started arts with Chinese Brush painting years ago.  I learned the "traditional" method which is very realistic and soon advanced to "Ling Nan" method, an equivalent of western impressionism.

One of my realistic paintings (kingfisher) on the right, a contemporary figure ("Nothingness is Everythingness) in the middle, and one of my Ling Nan paintings (Lotus) are shown down bellow.  The one at the far bottom is an abstract that I call "Creation".  The top part of the painting represents a mother's womb and the part underneath shows the growth on Earth.                                                                                        Chinese paintings or Japanese Sumi-e paintings are basically the same art form and are usually painted in china ink on rice paper. I some times use western watercolor paper as I did to paint my Kingfisher painting on the right.  Of course everybody uses a range of watercolors depending on what they paint according to their preference.

             

                                             

I call this abstract painting below, "Creation". The top part of the painting represent a Mother's womb, the middle round shape in the middle represents the Sun and the lower part is Growth on Earth.

 To paint the top part (the womb), I dipped my brush in ink, started painting from the central left side, continued without lifting the brush from the paper till I ran out of ink around the central right area, Contour painting, in other words.   The red areas representing the ovaries was added later.