To either copy or be in the slightest degree hampered by nature is a mark of inferiority in Chinese and Japanese art.
The very abstract art of the Orient has its elaborate conventions, but those conventions are all in the direction of pure art, whereas the conventions of our art (music always excepted) are all in the direction of imitation.
It was a theory of the great Chinese teacher, Chinanpin, and particularly enforced by him, that trees, plants, and grasses take the form of a circle, called in art Rin kan; or a semi-circle, Han kan; or an aggregation of half circles, called fish-scales, Gyo sin; or a modification of these latter, called moving fish-scales, Go sin Katsu.[61]
In regard to painting moving waters, whether deep or shallow, in rivers or brooks, bays or oceans, Chinanpin declared it was impossible for the eye to seize their exact forms because they are ever changing and have no fixed, definite shape; therefore, they cannot be sketched satisfactorily; yet, as moving water must be represented in painting, it should be long and minutely contemplated by the artist and its general character—whether leaping in the brook, flowing in the river, roaring in the cataract, surging in the ocean or lapping the shore—observed and reflected upon, and after the eye and the memory are both sufficiently trained and the very soul of the artist is saturated, as it were, with this one subject, and he feels his whole being calm and composed, he should retire to the privacy of his studio and with the early morning sun to gladden his spirit there attempt to reproduce the movement of the flow; not by copying what he has seen, for the effect would be stiff and wooden, but by symbolizing according to certain laws what he feels and remembers.
It begins to be plain why the Japanese expert was profoundly interested in the modern pictures and drawings.
One of the most important principles in the art of Japanese painting—indeed a fundamental and entirely distinctive characteristic—is that called living movement, sei do, or Kokoro machi, it being, so to say, the transfusion into the work of the felt nature of the thing to be painted by the artist. Whatever the subject to be translated—whether river or tree, rock or mountain, bird or flower, fish or animal—the artist at the moment of painting it must feel its very nature, which, by the magic of his art, he transfers into his work to remain forever, affecting all who see it with the same sensations he experienced when executing it.
This is not an imaginary principle, but a strictly enforced law of Japanese painting. The student is insistently admonished to observe it. Should his subject be a tree he is urged when painting it to feel the strength which shoots through the branches and sustains the limbs; or if a flower to try to feel the grace with which it expands or bows its blossoms. Indeed, nothing is more constantly urged upon his attention than this great underlying principle that it is impossible to express in art what one does not first feel.