Singing Cranes at the Mountain Stream
The Chinese title is, "He Ming Shan Jian" which literally means, "Cranes Sing Mountain Stream".
This painting depicts cranes as they sing next to a stream or creek. Another way to translate the artist's title is "The Call of the Cranes from the Mountain Stream".
This is painted on special xuan paper (rice paper) with then mounted to a hand-made silk scroll.
This hand-painted artwork is from the
Xiao Meng Asian Art Collection
The artists of this collection are actually a married couple who travel around China together looking for subjects to paint. Their real names are Chen Yong Ping and Chen Wei Ling but they sign all of their work under the single pen name Xiao Meng.
They work as a team on most of these paintings. One of them does the background and the other will handle the detail work on each painting.
The artists take great pride in the fact that they have developed their own unique painting style which they call "hazy painting" (this is roughly translated - it sounds better in Chinese).
They use a combination of "freehand style" and "elaborate style" in their paintings. The background is done using broad fast strokes and spray with very thin paint. The foreground (cranes) are done with a lot of detail using a delicate technique with a very fine brush.
