Comparison 1: Inkbrush Expression with Hasegawa Tohaku
[Click image to see a larger version.]
Hasegawa Tohaku
Pine Trees (16th century)
Ink painting on paper (two six-fold screens), w345.1 cm x h155.1 cm each (135.86" x 61.06")
Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan
At top is an example of ink wash painting ('sumi-e' in Japan), part of the long, long East Asian tradition of creating vividly expressive paintings in simple black ink with a brush.
Firstly, when the individual marks are left nakedly visible like this, here as in Van Gogh's work the effect cannot help but be expressive. And secondly, we could also notice that in a landscape scene like this, the organic nature of the marks helps reinforce the subject matter — and even though all that's being used is black ink, there is still an enormous range of organic marks that can be made.
Lastly, I'm going to HIGHLY recommend that you click the link to get the zoom-in-able version of this piece. Try to get in there to see what each individual flick of the brush or sweep of washed-out ink looks like: again, mark-making is a simple concept, and is definitely used simply here, but this is a great piece for seeing how much can be indicated by so little.