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Arts & Entertainment

Huntington Highlight: Learn the Art of Chinese Brush Painting

Each month, artist and author Nan Rae leads students in exploring the art of Chinese brush painting at The Huntington.

One of the things I enjoy most about writing this column every week is the opportunity it gives me to explore the many facets of . Aside from its extensive collections and beautiful gardens, The Huntington hosts an array of enriching educational programs, including hands-on classes like artist Nan Rae’s painting workshop.

Every third Wednesday of the month, Rae guides students in the techniques of watercolor Chinese brush painting. She began teaching classes at The Huntington about 16 years ago and has “quite a following of devoted students”, as The Huntington’s Communications Coordinator Lisa Blackburn told me in an email. When I talked to Rae on the phone, I got a sense as to why. Whenever she spoke, I could hear a smile in her voice, and she seemed most concerned about one thing: that her students have fun.

“I love teaching because I love to see what [painting] does for people,” she said, adding that students who have never painted before sign up for her classes and “they do great.” Each class is a self-contained unit focusing on a particular subject and includes a lesson plan with illustrations to help students continue practicing at home. This week, students will learn to paint the koi, an ornamental fish often found in the ponds of Japanese and Chinese gardens.

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Rae explained that there are two different schools of Chinese brush painting. The gongbi, or “palace style”, is highly detailed and colorful; Rae described it as a style associated with artisans rather than artists. “The type of painting that we do [in class] is the type of painting that was done by the gentleman scholars or the literati in China,” she said. As one of the pages on her Web site explains, “The Literati style seeks to transcend the mere representation of a subject to capture its ch'i, or life force, by using a 
minimum of brush strokes for maximum effect.”

Take a walk in The Huntington’s Chinese Garden (Garden of Flowering Fragrance), and you’ll get a sense of the surroundings that inspired these “gentleman scholars” of ancient times. Pavilions, walkways and bridges combine with a carefully designed landscape to create a harmonious balance between nature and the man-made. 

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The Literati, or free-form, style is characterized by spontaneity and expression. Unlike artists of the Western tradition, who might go out into a garden and cut a flower to bring it inside, study it and then paint while observing it, the free-form Chinese brush artists would leave the flower alone, taking with them only the sense or impression of its essence, and paint it from memory. Or, as Rae said, from the heart.

“There’s a saying: ‘From heart to arm to hand to brush to paper’, which is really lovely,” Rae said. “Another term for it is ‘written idea’. It’s really true, go-for-it painting.”

And go for it is exactly what Rae encourages her students to do, whether or not they’ve ever held a brush before in their lives. She prefers helping people to complete a painting, rather than spend a class doing exercises over and over. At the end of a class, she said that most students will have done two paintings, possibly three.

If you’ve ever felt a longing after wandering through The Huntington’s gardens and galleries to indulge your own inner artist, Rae’s class sounds to me like a good place to start. The fee for class is $50, which includes all materials—all you need to bring is lunch. Class runs from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and will be held in the teaching greenhouse near the Children's Garden. Call Rae at (818) 842-6489 to register.

For more information on Nan Rae and her classes, visit her Web site. To see what other classes and programs are happening at The Huntington, take a look at the online calendar.

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