Landscape Representation

First Semester 2018

Professor: Rolando Andrea

Student: Barrero Daniel

Drawing: Ma-Yüan - Dancing and Singing (Peasants Returning from Work)

Ma Yuan and the Sung dynasty in landscape painting.

“Only when there is no goal and no rush the human senses are fully open to receive the world“

Alan Watts

In gardens, parks and outdoors spaces visitors are generally confronted with the most elemental
materials and sensations. Water, plants and stones make the experience of walking through a
landscape healing and invigorating because of the interaction and convergence of all the senses.
How to develop a creative process and a representation system for landscape design that
approaches the phenomenological experience?

The use of perspective in the Western culture made the eye the main focus of the perceptual
world. It became a way of symbolically showing a place but also a way of understanding and
experiencing the world. Is a way of perceiving and designing that is so rooted in us that I decided
to take a step back from the classical western ways of representation and look into other culture's
approaches. Eastern art has always fascinated me and decided to develop a research on Zen
Buddhism to understand better their philosophical, poetic and artistic pursuits because of the
tremendous feeling of naturalness this art exudes.

The quality and approach of Zen art in China and Japan, mostly where Buddhism and Shintoism
developed, has made studies on how expressing sensations, sounds, smells and even feelings
through a two-dimensional system for centuries. Is an approach that comes from an
understanding of nature not as something apart from spirit or humans, something inert to control
and conquer, but as a complementary opposite that create a whole. The favourite subjects of zen
artists are not directly symbolic or religious but focused on natural, concrete and secular things.
The work of art is not only understood as a way of representing nature but as being itself a work
of nature. This is because the technique involves the art of #artlessness, or the controlled
accidents, so the paintings take shape as naturally as grasses and rocks do. Is not that they are
let to mere chance but that both the natural element of chance and the human element of control
coexist.

The influence of Zen Buddhism in Chinese culture was at its peak during the southern Sung
dynasty (1127-1279) and in that time Zen monasteries were leading centres of the Chinese
Scholarship.

The Sung masters where predominantly landscape painters and created a wonderful tradition of
to represents the life of nature. Of waters, mists, rocks, trees, mountains understood as a life were
man belongs but doesn’t control, and that is sufficient for itself and has no purpose of its own.
Although they seem so, are not fantastic landscapes but pretty common views in the Chinese
landscape.

During this time the most used technique for

painting was Chinese black ink. It is capable
of a great variety of tones and qualities of
black. It was an expression of spontaneity
because of the continuous free movements
made over the absorbent paper with

sharped pointed brush , as if dancing and

not writing.

Another characteristic of the paintings is

empty space in the pictures that appears to
be part of the painting but not just
unpainted surfaces. This way of expressing
a lot by showing as less as possible is what
mostly interested me and decided to do a
painting by one of the masters of this
technique: Ma-Yüan. It as a way of painting
by no painting. Of balancing form with
emptiness, and mostly of knowing when
one has said enough. Also in Ma-Yüan is
impressive the use of the brush from bold to
delicate, from extremely detailed trees to
bold masses and outlines and uneven ink.
Due to the presences of all of this
characteristics, and the similarity of format
to A3 and the possibility of more detail, I
decided to reproduce his painting Dancing
and Singing(Peasants Returning from Work).

I decided to use more modern tools that

could give similar results to the original
technique but that can be used easily for
site visits or production of views or fast
sketches. I used pencil for the clouds and
smog, black drawing pens for details, trees,
people and hatches and markers for the
bold and strong masses.

References and Bibligraphy:

WALKER Sophie, Il Giardino Giapponese, 2017

WATTS Alan, The way of Zen, 1957