The bamboo leaf line (chiku yau byou) ([Plate XLIX] upper). This style of painting, which aims at suggesting the leaf of the bamboo, was much in favor formerly in China. Japanese artists seldom employ it.
The mixed style (kon byou) ([Plate XLIX] lower), in which any of the foregoing seventeen styles can be employed provided the body of the garment be laid on first in mass and the lines painted in afterward while the sumi or paint is still damp. This gives a satiny effect.
There are many other ways of painting the lines of the garment but the preceding eighteen laws give the strictly classic methods known to oriental art.
The orchid, bamboo, plum, and chrysanthemum paragons (ran chiku bai kiku) are called in art the Four Paragons. Although these may be the first studies taught they are generally the last subjects mastered. Much learning and research have been expended upon them in China and Japan. An [pg 67] artist who can paint shi kun shi is a master of the brush. I will indicate some of the laws applicable to each of these subjects.
The orchid grows in the deepest mountain recesses, exhaling its perfume and unfolding its beauty in silence and solitude, unheralded and unseen; thus, regardless of its surroundings and fulfilling the law of its being, fifteen hundred years ago it was proclaimed by the poet and painter San Koku to typify true nobility and hence was a paragon. In poetry it is called the maiden's mirror. Many great Chinese writers have taken the orchid (ran) for their nom de plume, as Ran Ya, Ran Tei, Ran Kiku, and Ran Ryo.
[Plate LII] shows an orchid plant in flower. The established order of the brush strokes for the leaves of is indicated at the tips by numerals one to eleven; that of the flower stalk and flower by numbers twelve to twenty-one. Various forms are invoked in painting both the plant and the flower and are more or less graphically suggested. These forms are indicated by numbers, as follows:
Leaf blade No. 1 reproduces twice the stomach of the mantis (22), the tail of the rat (23), with the cloud longing (bo un) of the tip (24). Leaf No. 2 is similarly constructed but is painted to intersect leaf No. 1, leaving between them a space (No. 25) called the elephant's eye. Leaf No. 3 is intersected by leaf No. 4, enclosing another space between them, known as the eye of the phoenix. Adding leaves Nos. 5 and 6, called seki or kazari, meaning ornament, we have the most essential [pg 68] parts of the orchid plant. Leaf No. 7 is known as the rat's tail and leaf No. 8 as the body of a young carp. Nos. 9,10 and 11 are called nail heads, from their fancied resemblance to such objects. With these the plant is structurally complete.
Bamboo, Sparrow and Rain. Plate VII.
The flower stalk is divided into four parts (Nos. 12 to 15), called rice sheaths. The flower is made with six strokes (16 to 21), called the flying bee (26). The three dots in the flower reproduce the sentiment of the Chinese character for heart (23).