I first met Ms. Diana Meng at her home in the Harrisburg area. She was recommended to me as being an exceptional Chinese painter who had been awarded grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to pass on her traditional art to others in the region through avenues like the Chinese Cultural Arts Institute. She was born in mainland China, but her family moved to Taiwan when she was only a year old. Diana grew up there, and she stayed in Taiwan until she finished college.

Like many of her friends, Ms. Meng left Taiwan to attend graduate school in the United States. At the end of the school year she married a man she had met back home in Taiwan, and together the young couple decided to stay in the United States. Diana's husband was offered a job at Penn State, so they moved to Harrisburg, where, thirty-five years later, Diana has now been living for longer than she lived in her home country. She now has two grown children who also live here in the United States.

It was clear through our conversation that she found the move difficult. She told me, "When you first get here, you just cry every day… but now it’s my home. There’s nobody left over there." Like Ms Meng, most of her family has also immigrated and she now has brothers and sisters in New Jersey, Nebraska, and California.

The Writing on the Wall

Diana began to study art when she was in junior high school. She liked it so much that she chose Commercial Design as the focus of her college education. Not wanting that to substitute for her interest in traditional painting and calligraphy, she made arrangements to take private lessons with a tutor every week in addition to all of her school classes.

These days, Diana tutors students in calligraphy and painting in much the same way she was taught. She took some time out of her busy day to show me the different steps and techniques to doing traditional Chinese painting.

The paintbrush used in Chinese painting must be held straight up and down above the paper, as Diana shows in this picture. The bristles are usually made from the hair of an animal, and the handle is wooden. Brushes come in large and small sizes.

The Chinese ink stone, shown at right, has a shallow, circular well in its center to collect clear water poured in by the artist. This water won't remain clear for long, though. As soon as the artist places her ink stick in the water and begins to grind it gently along the bottom of the ink stone, the water transforms into useable ink. It grows darker and darker as more of the black ink stick is rubbed off into the mixture. Since the traditional method of Chinese painting does not permit brushstrokes to be retraced, shadows and a sense of three-dimensionality must be created at every moment ink is gliding onto the paper. Therefore, traditional Chinese artists are trained to lift multiple shades of ink onto their brushes in the single, fluid motion of dipping their brushes into the pool of an ink stone.

Originally Chinese painting was only done in black ink. Diana adds color to some of her paintings, but the method she uses remains close to what has been in use in China for around five thousand years. Even with the addition of color, Diana expertly creates depth in her paintings with each original, determined stroke of her brush.

I met Diana at her home, where she generously brought out her materials to give me a demonstration. Her tools were carefully wrapped in soft paper inside their well-worn box. As she folded back the layers enveloping her tools, Diana told me that she has been using the same ink stone for more than 50 years, and that Diana’s mother had used it for many years before that. Diana’s brushes have been in use for almost as long.

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