Japanese Brush Painting

Exhibit showcases East Asian brushwork

Glencoe resident Regina Siske shares her passion for creating Asian brush paintings in her first solo exhibit “Heart’s Journey” at the Wilmette Public Library August 5-30.

“I have studied this art form for quite some time and it’s really kind of where I’ve come from and where I’ve been,” said Siske. “It’s been a whole journey for me with this art form and my love of it.”

An East Asian brush painting style, sumi-e, is a Japanese term meaning ink painting. Chinese Zen Buddhist monks introduced the technique to Japan in the mid-14th century. Traditionally, it captures landscapes in black and white.

This art form involves painting with black ink or Asian pigments, which resemble watercolors, on rice paper made from various plants. After painting, the piece must be mounted to another larger piece of rice paper then glued to a solid surface such as a board or a door in a cool space. All air bubbles must be smoothed out with a special brush.

Work with caution

Artists must be careful throughout the process. The paint is not forgiving and does not allow for mistakes.

The rice paper is also delicate. “You can rip it in the painting process if you’ve got it too wet or if you’re overworking it and if you make one mistake in painting, it’s done,” she said. “If you’re overworking it, it shows. Your strokes are really important and it shows whether there’s energy and life in them and usually it doesn’t have to be a complicated piece.”

Siske, a former watercolor painter, took classes in 1998 in which she began to focus on sumi-e. Since then she has studied with local and national instructors as well as with international masters of Asian brush painting.

In the beginning she stuck with the most traditional form of sumi-e. Eventually she felt comfortable making it more her own by using her strokes and tones to capture her familiar surroundings such as her backyard garden.

The provenance of the art form intrigues Siske. Knowing that people have been painting the same way for thousands of year, and entering into this history of how this art form began, was exciting.

Of course to her, she said, “it was all so new — rice paper, ink stick, ink stone — it was very different from what I knew,” she said. “There’s something very spiritual about it for me and that was a real connection.

Gardening » Oh, the Zen of it!

During a business trip to Oregon in 1977, Anderson visited the Portland Japanese Garden on a cab driver’s recommendation, and was so impressed by its calm and serenity that he decided to create his own version. He invited the garden’s highly regarded Japanese landscape architect, Hoichi Kurisu, to Rockford and asked him to design a garden around a swampy pond next to his new hillside house. David Anderson, 40, first got to know the gardens as a “pretty cool” place to grow up next to, riding his bike, playing hockey and fishing there. Now his goals are to add a children’s garden, carry out a shoreline restoration and overcome patrons’ disappointment at the closure of the popular onsite restaurant, which he says had become a distraction.

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