ZEN painting class with renowned painter Damwon Kim Chang-bae
2024-09-04
By Honorary Reporter Alison Zobenko from Ireland
Damwon Kim Chang-bae is a renowned Zen painter who studied under Geumchu Lee Nam-ho, who was known to revive Korean traditional paintings. He is also the 10th generation descendant of Damwon Kim Hong-do, a famous painter from the Joseon dynasty.
He recently taught a class on Thursday 29th of in the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, Ireland. Zen painting has components of Buddhism and mindfulness while letting the brush flow on the paper. Definitely a challenge for my friend and I!
What are all the items you need for calligraphy and painting? Hanji paper (한지), brush, ink, ink mat, ink stone (벼루), blocks, bowl, and water.
Hanji paper is made from the Korean mulberry tree, which is very durable due to the directions of the grains in the paper making it useful not only for ink but also historically used for door screens. The smooth side is placed onto the mat while a block is placed at the top and bottom of the paper to keep it in place.
Traditionally the calligraphy ink is made by grinding a block onto the 'ink stone', which has a few drops of water inside the well! The ink block is made of burned tree soot and glue while the 'ink stone' is a non-absorbent stone. The ink stone contains the concentrated ink and a bowl of water is placed nearby for diluting the ink with the brush. This bowl is also used to shape the brush into a perfect point.
Otherwise, you can use the time saving remedy of just using calligraphy ink ;)
Damwon Kim Chang-bae was using traditional teaching methods during the class. At first, we all crowded around his paper as he demonstrate his painting. We could simply watch or film videos for us to remember the exact brush techniques used. Then, he went around to every student and painted the same subject along with their name. Each painting was so similar yet had their differences. First we learned the basic strokes, a lotus, then a shrimp and fish - final round was the students own creation!
You might think it is silly to copy all these brush strokes, but after doing multiple paintings I realised that every single stroke completely effects the water-ink interaction with the paper and brush. Never miss the primary steps, no matter how excited you are to get to the final painting!
The left image is a printed version of the strokes we should do - the teacher also demonstrated the strokes at his station- and the right are my attempts.
Now, we can begin our own lotuses. The left is the teacher's painting, middle is mine, and the right is my friend. This is when I learned brush stroke is very important for ink spreading. When using the side of the brush the ink does not spread around the paper as much, leaving the white space in the middle. When I used the point of the brush then the white space always disappeared by the spreading. Practice sadly does make perfect so keep going!
This was my final painting! My favourite items to paint were the lotus and fish - since the prawn (slide 4) really threw me in for a loop. I was very happy to hear my friend and I to be the top students in the class! I hope to forever immortalise this art form with my personal art as well as teaching students in our Korean Society in Trinity College Dublin about his work and mindfulness.
Our final photo with the teacher himself in front of his painting exhibition - we are clearly some very happy fishes!
Please view Damwon Kim Chang-bae's work in his website > https://www.artko.kr/~damwongallery/
How about this article?
- Like1
- Support1
- Amazing0
- Sad0
- Curious0
- Insightful0
