Watson and Tsang Ink and Brush Painting Workshop Aug 23-25

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Course Details:

Aug 23 6:00-9:00pm | Aug 24 9:30am-12:30pm | Aug 25 9:30am-12:30pm
GEM Center for the Arts | VIVID Gallery on the 3rd floor
3 sessions | 3 contact hours per session
Tuition $60 per class, or $150 for all three!
Payable to Jeremiah Watson before class.

Course Description:
Learn about the power of line by brush. This workshop introduces fundamental elements of traditional ink and brush landscape painting. After a basic tool and material introduction, course one will begin with learning how to hold and position the brush in hand to apply subtle variations of strength, speed and concentration in line making. Building on the foundation of line, course two will build up the face of rocks and growing trees with ink and brush. A variety of tree structures and leaf constellations will be introduced. Students will be encouraged to find individual expression of character in the rocks and trees. Upon learning to build a basic compositional environment, course three of the workshop will conclude with an introduction to ways of reading and appreciating the unique perspective, scale and layering of ink and brush landscape painting.

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To register please RSVP http://watsonandtsang.com/workshop.html, or contact the GEM Center for the Arts gallery.

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Instructors: Watson and Tsang Artist Bio

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Watson and Tsang collaboration
Watson and Tsang are known for poetic architectural landscapes painted by powerful
brushwork. Both for art viewers in appreciation of the painted landscape and as artists sharing fresh ways of seeing the world, they make fine art to sustain a long and healthy life. While not willing to be bound by it, Watson and Tsang are not afraid to connect with tradition. By connecting art viewers across the time and space of distant communities, they use
understanding and dialogue to morph fear into curiosity and estrangement into friendship.

From 2011, Watson and Tsang have collaborated on a wide variety of hybrid projects.
Jeremiah Watson, artist name El Coyote, has a PhD in architecture art with a background in fine art. Tsang Tseng Tseng (曾貞貞), artist name Three Zan (三真), has an MFA focused in
traditional scholar painting of the Yangtze River Delta, and she is a master of ink and brush
landscape painting.

Over the years, they have developed toward an articulate fluency of exchange, while
maintaining flexibility for intuitive re-interpretation in their creative process. They often
celebrate the subtle misunderstandings and re-interpretations as exciting steps in their working process. Watson will often develop a place and composition through an iterative process of sketching and drawing by pen and pencil. Tsang will continue this composition and give it another life with her ink and brush.

Tsang Tseng Tseng
Tsang learned ink and brush painting from an early age. In 2008, she was selected as the
winner of the New Talent Prize in “The 24th Collective Exhibition of Macao Artists” by the
Macau government Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau. Tsang’s work started to be collected
overseas in 2010. Her first solo exhibition in Idaho, “Leaves Falling in The Ocean of Space,” was in 2012 at the Sandpoint Redtail Gallery. Tsang’s piece “Foguang Temple” was shown at the 2014 five-yearly national exhibition of China, “The Twelfth National Exhibition of Fine Arts in the Liaohe Art Museum” of Liaoning, China. In 2014, she was one of two students admitted to the China Academy of Art (CAA) graduate program of Professor Lin Hai Zhong, who is famous throughout Asia as a key representative of traditional scholarly painting. The CAA is known in Asia as the leader of authentic ink and brushwork arts. After completing graduate school in the fine arts program of the CAA in 2017, Tsang Tseng Tseng has continued to show works in China, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States with Jeremiah Watson as Watson and Tsang. Tsang’s hand Tsang is recognized in the traditional fine art community of China, most prominently for her powerful brush stroke. This power comes from a balance of leisure and liveliness in the character of her brushwork. Her strength of brush-stroke is a balanced polarity of sophisticated and refined subtlety at one end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum, wild and authentic.

 

The term in Chinese language that is used to explain the atmosphere of her painting is xiāosàn sàndàn (萧散散淡); xiāosàn (萧散) means uninhibited and carefree, while sàndàn (散 淡) easygoing and light. xiāosàn sàndàn implies an atmospheric breadth qìxī (气息), which shows through the work. This breadth is an attitude of someone that is not chasing or trying to force something into existence, but letting inner feelings and character show through the work.

Jeremiah Watson
Watson graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in fine arts and
a degree in architecture in 2010, while receiving the AIA Henry Adams Silver Award. He was
selected as a participant of the European Honors Program located in Rome, Italy in 2009. In
2011 Watson received a full scholarship to attend graduate school at the China Academy of Art (CAA) in Hangzhou, China. He completed graduate school with honors as the class valedictorian in 2014. In 2018, he graduated with a PhD under the professorship of Wang Shu, winner of The Pritzker Architecture Prize. Watson has taught in the CAA undergraduate department of architecture art between 2012 and 2018, while he has been developing an art and design practice with Tsang. Watson exhibited work in Rhode Island in 2014, "RISD in Rome: European Honors Program." He has exhibited works of fine art most recently in Shaoxing and Hangzhou, China. In 2018 he was invited to show work in the CAA Museum of Fine Art as distinguished alumni for the 80th anniversary of the China Academy of Art.

Watson has completed art and architecture projects throughout China, in Europe and
Switzerland. His work in China is recognized most specifically for developing a strong sense of place, through regionalism, concept, metaphor, and tectonic expression. His designs in wood architectonic design have been adopted in museums, exhibition structures, hotels, and
landmark architectures globally.

Watson’s hand
Watson has many layers of experience in his character, because he comes from the far
west, and has moved in phases to the far east over the past fifteen years. An Idaho native, he
has an earthy foundation, from studying fine art and architecture at RISD on the east coast has a rigorous academic attitude and method of communication, and from experience living in China, studying, teaching and working at the CAA, has fully absorbed a gentle scholarly wisdom of viewing the world.

 

In drawing, Watson builds up a broad understanding of context and reaches a calm state of mind to make strong intuitive strokes. He usually works with pen and pencil. The drawing evolves in iteration from wild marks of intuitive ideas toward precise constructions of space and environment, moving often back and forth between intuitive marking and clarified space-making. Both Watson and Tsang embody a balance of strong intuition on one side and scholarly ambition on the other side.

Watson and Tsang current
Watson and Tsang continue to develop their Gold Mountain Series project while
preparing to show the collection in major cities across the United States, Europe and Asia. They are using their Gold Mountain Series to show the world as a reality of beautiful places unfolding in infinity. Their choice of medium and representation methods goes beyond the diminishing perspective of eyesight to show the world as it is experienced. This vision of reality can be recognized in their recent work, Gold Mountain 2019.

 

From a distance, Gold Mountain 2019 appears to be a singular representational view
from a fixed position in space. On closer reading, the painting unfolds as a seamlessly
interconnected network of experiential spaces. Gold Mountain 2019, like the Earth from outer
space, is a multitude of places that are revealed by the vantage point of a viewer. Layers
overlapping are loaded with meaning. Each viewer finds a unique point of entry, layer over
layer, the viewer creates an individual worldview, yet this worldview is shared by all viewers of
Gold Mountain 2019.