Learning to paint

I've always been reasonably adequate at drawing what I see, but for some reasons, when it comes to painting (figures & portraits specifically), I fumbled like a clown trying to juggle baby crocodiles while standing on top of five stacked beach balls.

There seems to be some links missing in my brain, that are supposed to connect one skill to another.

What's the difference between drawing & painting?

I feel comfortable with drawing because there's only one variable that I have to control: the values (ie. darkness). By varying the density of the applied medium, I can define light & shadow, shape & form quite easily.
Similarly, I can paint reasonably well as long as it's limited to only one color, but attempts to create a "real painting" (ie. a picture with full color ranges) mostly end up becoming a color mess.

As I gradually improved my skills over the years, I've learnt to work with 2 tones. I'll establish the values with a dark color, then use a light color to add highlights to different areas. It's an improvement, but still far from a full color painting.

So now what?

Not long ago I discovered traditional painting techniques like glazing & scumbling, meaning the artist will apply transparent color layers on top of monotoned underpaintings, thus build up richly colored surfaces.
(see an example here)

Sounds easy enough right? Seems like a perfect solution to my problem.

Well...the concept is easy enough to understand, but the application is definately a lot more complicated. For the start the varieties of mediums & paints out there are enough to confuse any beginners, then the technique itself will require a lot of experiments & learnings to get a hang of.

So this is where I am now, at the monotone stage:



Paintings like these are my inspirations:




I honestly have no idea how far can I take my skills, but I'm not too concerned about it, for now I'll just take it one step at a time and see what happens next.

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perception of time

I used to think that if there's a remote control for my life, I'd put it in fast forward mode, so that I can quickly go through everything life has to offer and be done with it. This idea, although still instereting, seem less relevant to me nowadays.

Somehow my perception of time have changed.
To me, the past few years seem like one single continuous day, and everything that happened feels like it was yesterday.

I feel like time has come to a stand still, so that in one eternal moment, I observed the occurance of countless events, saw myself change from one state into another, and witnessed sunrise and sunset over and over.

Maybe time really doesn't exist.


A brief internet search on related topics brought me some interesting finds:

A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy Of Godel And Einstein
"in 1949 Godel made a remarkable discovery: there exist possible worlds described by the theory of relativity in which time, as we ordinarily understand it, does not exist. He added a philosophical argument that demonstrates, by Godel's lights, that as a consequence, time does not exist in our world either. If Godel is right, Einstein has not just explained time; he has explained it away."

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/denying_time.shtml
"Perhaps humans invented the concept of time out of mortal fear; reasoning that if time were tangible then its degenerative march could be controlled, just as mankind has tried to subdue other aspects of the natural world. Immortality would be within our grasp! But while time may be a convenient metronome that delivers neatly portioned slivers of existence to conscious beings, the idea of a ‘universal time’ is looking increasingly fanciful, at least to some physicists."

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translating wikipedia

I've spend 3 days last week translating wikipedia's entry of Hannibal Barca from English to Chinese. It took a lot longer than I expected: 3 full days of work for 5000 words.

A lot of time was actually spend on finding out existing translations for all the different names, for historical person, tribes, countries, cities, provinces, rivers, mountains...etc, which turned out to be a rather time consuming job. Some of the names have no translations to be found, and some of them have different variations in which case I had to find out which one is consistent with other wikipedia entries.

In the end it's a rather satisfying experience to see everything being neatly put together, however I'm definately going to take a break & probably won't start translating another entry any time soon.

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New years day

Yesterday was a strange new years day. I woke up to a bright sunshine, but then the sky turned dark, rain & hail followed. In the afternoon my backyard was again lit by rays of sunshine, but not far away heavy clouds occupied the sky, and for hours it thundered.
I lost count of the numbers, but I'm certain that more than a dozen of them occured within 2~3 hours.

For most part of the day I was clouded by a heaviness centered around my solar plexus, a feeling that had became all too familiar to me. It persisted until finally, during a half meditative state, that I focus my awareness on fully experiencing and observing this emotion, and right then it shifted.

Like an ice cube on a frying pan, the heaviness melted and vaporised within seconds, leaving not a single trace behind.

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