Tinta Ink
Ink: a direct manifestation of the original universe
Just as oil paint - thick and glossy - is the medium that has characterized the European pictorial tradition since the mid-15th century, the medium of the Chinese monochrome pictorial tradition is ink (water-based) - light and opaque - whose use - as we know it today - dates back to the 8th century BC. This data about the medium that enables the creation of an image provides information on how the materiality (solid-liquid) of the painting medium determines the relationship with the support (vertical-horizontal), the speed of its execution (fast-slow), the relationship with the type of image creation (with correction-without correction) and finally the artist's attitude towards the creation process (logical-intuitive).
“Ink, like the brush,
It is considered a direct manifestation of the original universe”
(“Emptiness and Fullness”, p. 157)
Solid ink or ink stick
When we think of ink in the West, we imagine a bottle of liquid ink into which a pen is dipped. Ink in Asia is quite different. Traditionally it is sold in the form of solid sticks, rectangular or cylindrical, often so elaborately decorated that it is a shame to use them.
The ink used for Japanese, Chinese and Korean painting and calligraphy is made of organic material, and is presented in a block that must be rubbed on a stone called suzuri 硯 to grind it with water for about twenty minutes to an hour.
Grinding the bar on a stone provides a moment of meditation to rest the mind and be empty to think about each new piece.
Liquid ink 墨汁 or BOKUJUU
Nowadays, bottled liquid ink is also sold. If you buy it in a Chinese supermarket, it is called Mòzhi 墨汁, in Japanese it is called Bokujuu 墨汁. Like the ground ink stick, this one can also be diluted with water to reduce its intensity and obtain a wide variety of greys.
- But, is India ink black?
Yes, it is black and matte, but it has nuances. These nuances also depend - to a large extent - on the type of wood used to make the soot as well as the paper on which it is used. The ink is made with very fine grains of soot (usually from pine wood), binder (usually from fish glue scales or animal horns and bones) and various flavorings such as white sandalwood or camphor. And depending on their recipes, many of which take their elements from traditional Chinese medicine, some inks turn red, others turn blue and others have "little sparkles" when viewed flush with the paper.
The term “splashed ink” (also known as broken ink, thrown ink, or broken ink) was first used to designate Wang Mo 王洽’s (China, 8th century) carefree and unorthodox process of creating distance in ink-painted landscapes:
“Before painting a landscape, Wang Mo drank a lot of wine.
When he was already drunk, he would start splashing ink on the silk. While laughing and singing, he would create stains with his foot and hands and throw ink around using the brush. This resulted in some parts having a lot of ink and in others it would be more diluted. Following the shapes that resulted from this, he would begin to outline mountains, rocks, clouds and fog, sometimes under the snow and sometimes in the rain, using the same spontaneity with which the world creates things.
Watching him was like seeing the deity creating”
Returning to splashed ink, a Chinese Painting Manual from 1120 AD explained that the process of splashing ink consisted of an initial ink blot, stroke or smudge created not with a brush but with an extravagant corporeal gesture. It added:
“This original mark could be the result of a thrown ink rag.”
And this throwing of ink with rags, spilling, pouring, staining, drawing are implicit operations in the very process of creation linked to speed. One of the characteristics of this aqueous medium is water, whose characteristic is its rapid expansion, which is why speed is worked on and therefore spontaneity, without apparent effort, as an attitude of the painter towards the paper support and as an absence of rational intentionality.
Finally, I would like to remind you that these types of gestures - whether they are brushstrokes or thrown rags - do not allow for any doubts.
For more information, you can visit our article about our visit to the Boku-undo ink factory in Japan in 2016 or visit our studios in Madrid.
Luciana Rago and Elena Hikari
Ink for Shodou and ink for Sumi-e
Japanese painting and calligraphy share their working materials, but the way they use these materials is where they differ. Perhaps the clearest example is that of ink.
While calligraphy focuses on the form/essence of the stroke and therefore uses pure ink with hardly any dilution, painting mixes ink with water to obtain the greatest possible number of nuances. In the book “Emptiness and Fullness” Francois Cheng tells us “…with its infinite nuances, it is by itself a sufficient resource for the painter to embody with it all the variations of color that nature offers. Ink is associated with the brush because, isolated, it is nothing more than virtual matter to which only the brush can give life.” (p. 137).
According to Chinese classifications, inks are divided into six different types: dry, diluted, white, wet, concentrated and black, depending on their purity, humidity and the way they are applied to the brush. The combination of these six variants allows us to create atmospheres, tonality, modelling of shapes, impression of distance and to account for the action of light on rocks as well as on other forms of nature.
Splashed ink
In the field of painting there is a technique called “spattered ink” which is considered by the classics as one of the most difficult pictorial techniques to perform, and which seeks to give a sense of the general structure of the composition through accurate brushstrokes.
In the West, the stereotype of the Buddhist monk painter is recurrent, centered, an example of a calm mind and in the middle of nature without any noise, so it is likely that the reader will feel disappointed after reading this text.
After doing some research, I can say that this seems to have been the case, but not only this. There have been - and there are - painters and calligraphers who carried out their practices and works while disturbed, drunk, consumers of substances that alter the consciousness, murderous painters and calligraphers and also those who give calm just by looking at them. All of them are part of the history of Chinese and Japanese art. All of them are those who understood that ink becomes addictive when one begins to know it, because it never ceases to surprise and to lead the painter along paths that cross the threshold of reality.
