Artist statement

Artist Statement by KAM FU BERNADETTE LEE-PISAPIA

Painting and Drawing

To paint and draw as a creative person was what I intended when I was a young student.

How to paint and draw in the western tradition was what I had in mind when I was a young student.

Where to learn such tradition was the goal I gave myself, thus my passion included finding the place where such traditions were historically practiced.

I was given creative training in abstract expressive means in Canada. ( University of Alberta . BFA, 4 years )

But I proceeded to receive British training in drawing at Edinburgh College of Art. ( as a visiting student for one year as as a Postgraduate Student in Drawing and Painting for another year )

The idea of being a student in Europe inspired me, so much so that I decided to be trained in Florence, Italy as a local Italian Art student, where the idea of beginning an Art Academy by Michelangelo took roots. ( Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze , for another 5 years )

The intriguing questions regarding why a person still is interested in drawing and painting in a technological advanced age interests me.

Just what it means to create a single mark on a page, a special personal mark making in a specific space became perhaps more of an internal self-questioning rather than a technical issue.

What does a visually active person do when he describes his sense of space by a mark, or by a non-mark.

What kind of statement is he or she is trying to make in a world where technical drawings and special effects in three dimensional construction  as an illusion are so commonly , effortlessly practiced?

As I became older and am more aware of the problems posed by the younger generation, I became more interested in works that are less technically orientated ( in the sense of computerised drawing ).

I gave myself tasks that I had not yet developed: hand weaving a line in space, as if drawing in three dimensions means to physically involve oneself in weaving the physical space with lines ( material used : threads or wool ).

As one begins to weave in between the plants, one is invited to notice space one rarely is aware of ( as a concrete reality ) when one makes a drawing, for instance.

This kind of re-discovery is soul fulfilling as if one is able to have an internal dialogue with one's subject matter- , which somehow is being extended from only a plant to in-between- plants.

That in between, is spiritual.

It is the breath that breathes in and out,

from my breath to the breath of the plant, and somehow, the space in between is even made concrete through such breathing of in and out.

Apart from weaving lines as a drawing. breathing exercise, I am interested in piecing moments of my own past through tracing of seemingly unimportant scenes borrowed from old film sequences.

The return to my childhood memories through copies of frames of impact seen on iPad is a reminder for certain figurative impact, which, somehow, have been overlooked but are reframed as points of departure for a new project:

Just how one is linked from one ’s stored impact of images ( long thought of being forgotten, an unimportant trivial matter ) to other learned impact of images ( historically celebrated visual images, universally accepted as important matter ) without neglecting any.

The way we are brought up and the way we are nurtured with visual images are what make up a cultural baggage. The ignoring of the seemingly trivial ones means one’s understanding of oneself is only partial.

Therefore, an attempt is for me to piece all my trivial and non trivial impact of images together, in an honest attempt to reconstruct a personal diary, as a student who was passionate about visual image making as well as being passionate in finding ways of learning the western and eastern traditions of image making.

The next project : reintroduction of Western and Eastern traditions ( western artist and Eastern muse ) through a series of works / Drawing and Painting-

As someone who has been interested in finding ways of understanding through the study of western colour traditions and Eastern calligraphy since 1982, I found the moment arrives where I could illustrate the idea of how Eastern Calligraphy has been understood by great masters of the West, and how misunderstanding or approximate understanding are intriguing elements that lie behind a piece of masterpiece. 

how to re-enter the mind path of a great western artist and to see if, as a hypothesis, a sequence of images of the Eastern images ( of Eastern tradition ) when shown, would somehow lead that particular artist to express the way he or she determined to express.

The idea is to try to understand how a western trained artist would come to understand the Eastern artistic form and be inspired and therefore, produce the kind of work we come to recognise as the masterpieces of that artist.

The use of sequential images to illustrate this idea is crucial as I have the feelings that most artists who were influenced by Eastern images were probably shown sequential images, not static images.

It is a unique opportunity nowadays to be able to use sequential images like the way we do with iPad. It is a perfect tool to study and to investigate the intriguing moments that formed great western artists in the past who were not only great as artists, but were great in drawing and painting.

In other words : a creative use of drawing and painting.

Bernadette Kam Fu Lee

26 March 2017

Italy

P.S

At approximately a month after I wrote this statement, I began a series of new experiments:

How to trace the bamboo shadows in my garden with a watercolour brush, coloured ink, and a sketch pad.

The idea of tracing bamboo shadows was said to have been discovered by a Lady Painter in the tenth century in China. The casting shadows on paper window inspired her to trace  the shadows onto the rice paper which was absorbent, and was believed to be the beginning of the practice of the Art of painting of bamboo in China.

I happened to come across such inspiring moments years after I planted the bamboo in my garden: the bamboo had grown and happened to cast shadows in an area where I would usually sit around.

So I took a sketch book and placed under the bamboo and allowed the shadows to make natural drawings.

They were perfect drawings, painted without marks and last only a few moments.

When I began to trace the shadows with coloured ink, I attempted to introduce the idea of space through the choosing of colours.

This way of tracing the shadows is different from the first Lady Painter who traced it with black ink.

Traditional black ink bamboo paintings are paintings that speak about the honesty of the discovery: that the shadows traced were not the forms themselves, but shadows.

I found this idea intriguing as after years of being accustomed to the idea that the Art of bamboo painting has to be done with black ink, I thought perhaps that was due to our too habitual way of seeing and of accepting a culturally established code.

In reality, when we see the black ink bamboo paintings, we do not read them as shadows, but forms.

We mistake the shadows for forms, because our cultural code ( that is , if you know about Chinese ink painting ) tells us to see them as forms.

But if you do not come from the same culture, you will question why only black ink is being used as portrayal of the form, in the history of Chinese bamboo painting.

When I began to use coloured ink on contemporary paper instead of black ink and rice paper, I intended to re-examine this intriguing question: Am I painting the shadows or am I painting the form?

So my experiments began with this criteria: first I began to trace the shadows, in coloured ink and a water coloured brush as opposed to black ink and Chinese brush. 

Then after some sketches, I painted the just traced shadowed part without tracing them, that is, from the normal observational point of view, by using the same coloured ink idea, with the water coloured brush.

My intention was to compare how a tracing shadow method or the observational method would portray the true quality of the subject matter.

That is because the shadows of the bamboo embody the intrinsic quality of the forms themselves: the shadows could be easily mistaken as the forms.

But are the shadows the forms?

Are the shadows more representative of the forms?

What do we understand as the intrinsic quality of a subject matter?

To go back to the two approaches: the tracing of the shadows looks different although at a glance one could mistake the tracing as an observational painting of the subject matter .

But at a closer look one sees an obvious flatness on the tracing of form- sketches even though colour was used to differentiate the space.

The observational method became more interesting as days went by: one became more acute in understanding the intrinsic quality of the subject matter after a week to ten days of this experimental approach. I believe it is due to the tracing as well as the understanding of the subject matter from an unconscious point of view.

This series of experiment was accompanied by short sequence of films which illustrate how 

1. the shadows make natural drawings without any intervention
2. the tracing and the observational approaches both are in need of a background where the natural shadows are still present- when they are present, either the tracing impact or the observational impact are strong. It is due to the white paper being now transformed as an arena that is three dimensional- instead of flatness , we perceive space or air
3. a question therefore came into mind: how one presents a visual impact could alter the actual impression of the work: these paintings or tracing look less interesting if not being accompanied by the filming sequences of the natural shadows.
4. It is interesting for me to re-enter the realm of the discovery of the first impact of the Chinese Lady painter of the tenth century and to re-appropiate that thrill by using contemporary means of expression. While she used what she believed to be natural and handy: rice paper already framed on her window pane, and black ink and Chinese brush which one would imagine them being her normal tools for writing, I used what I happened to have in my studio: coloured ink, watercolour brush and a sketch book.
5. As I have not learned the traditional Chinese way of how to paint a bamboo, I found this way of re-discovery more spiritually inspiring. The first bamboo painter never learned the technique before, thus her impact is long lasting. Once the technique or a mode of how to is being taught as a dogma, the person who goes through the process becomes too much like a technician.

9/05/2017