The Book of Orchid

This ebook provides a complete process of making a classic Chinese orchid painting. In this instructional ebook, Professor I-Hsiung Ju demonstrates many step-by-step lessons on leaves and flowers. He begins this ebook for painting orchid with an introduction of mood and modes of Chinese brush painting. It is followed by more studies of painting tools and positions of hand for doing the exercises. Finally, there is the discussion of composition and creative ideas. Besides the hundred or more black and white illustrations, there are twenty-two prints of the author’s paintings.

The first step in Chinese brush painting is learning the technique. In this instructional ebook, Professor I-Hsiung Ju demonstrates many step-by-step lessons on leaves and flowers. He begins this instructional ebook for painting orchid with an introduction of mood and modes of Chinese brush painting. This is followed by more studies of painting tools and positions of hand for doing the exercises. He explains how the curved orchid leaves are different from the straight bamboo leaves. He illustrates how the movement of brush is graceful and the formation of a group of leaves is suggesting that there are several “tails of jumping fish”. Professor Ju discusses how to handle the brush to make leaves and flowers. He explains the ways of doing each petal of the flower and putting them together as a cluster to form the flower. In the ebook Professor Ju provides a complete process of making a classic Chinese orchid painting. Finally, there is the discussion of composition and creative ideas. Besides the 104 black and white illustrations, there are twenty-two prints of the author’s paintings.

Professor I-Hsiung Ju was born in Jiangyin, Jiangsu, China, in 1923. He has been considered as one of the few Chinese artists able to blend two worlds of style, technique, and idiom to produce a unique form of painting that is both modern and traditionally Oriental. He graduated from the National University of Amoy in 1947 and received his B.A. degree in Chinese Art and Literature. Because of the war in China, he went to the Philippines to teach and at the same time to continue his studies. He received his B.F.A. in Painting in 1951 and M.A. in History in 1968 from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. During the time he resided in the Philippines, he was a prize winner in graphic art, oil painting, and Nanga works in various countries, a writer and lecturer on art, he has held many one-man shows in Australia, Canada, China, England, Hong Kong, Japan, and the Philippines. As an Artist-in-Residence and Professor of Art at Washington and Lee University, he was selected Professor of the Year for 1971 by the Ring-tum Phi, the Washington and Lee University newspaper and was awarded the Best Art Educator of the Year for 1974 by the Chinese National Writers and Artists' Association in Taipei, Taiwan, the Republic of China. Prof. Ju retired from Washington and Lee University in 1989 and was honored by the board as Professor Emeritus. He passed away on March 17, 2012.