Containment does not bode well with modern creativity. It kicks along boundaries, would not fit in the pigeon holes, and loves the unpredictable. There is nothing like that instinct that is celebrated by Jiu Jing Mo Shui Hua — alcohol ink painting?pigment is not a tool but a partner with its own agenda. It is a disaster of some sort when you tip up a plane and see color fly out in translucent rays. It is not something that is created on accuracy. It is constructed on the basis of momentum, chemistry, and the specific excitement of not being in full control. Go here!

There is a biological nature of alcohol ink. When a drop of cobalt drops on paper which has been soaked in synthetic paper, it does not stand where it is, but spreads at once, and forms rings of a beautiful and transparent colour. Blow on with a straw or blast with a heat gun and the color disintegrates even more, breaking up into veins, wisps and patterns that appear as borrowed by nature and not created by a painter. Its results may be in the form of aerial shots of the coastline, cross-sectional shots of minerals, or weather pattern shots seen by satellite. You are a part of the process, yet the media has the privilege to hit you out of the blue.

It is that conflict between the direction and the surrender in which the real creative force resides. You choose the palette. It is up to you where the initial color falls. Following that, the ink bargains. I have made an attempt to give a swirl of crimson and gold a clean, definite shape. The ink declined. It spurted beyond all I had intended and created something fuller and more alien than I had intended. The lesson was swift: by relaxing the reign, you are not going to lose the work. More often, it improves it.

There is a certain electricity to the color layer of this medium. Since the inks are transparent in layers the depth is created without becoming muddy each colour casts light on the one below instead of neutralizing it. The most useful gradient is made with a layer of warm amber beneath a deep violet, and seems to glow within. The metallic inks are moving about on the surface like suspended foil, moving with the change of angle of the light.

Toiling with alcohol ink learns in the end what good improvisation can teach, which is that the results are usually the most optimal when you cease demanding certain destination. You put the terms, you take the primary step, and then go the way the color goes. In between the initial drop and the ultimate dried glitter, creativity ceases to seem like a directorial effort and rather becomes like a dialogue.