CRABS

Qi Baishi maintained that an artist could only paint effectively subjects that he knew well through personal observation. Qi began painting earnestly fresh-water crabs (he never saw nor painted salt-water ones) after he moved into his Jiping Tang in Beijing in 1913, where he found some of these creatures living. The artist continued to depict crabs throughout his life, and by his mature years developed a successful combination of realism and abstraction that both captured the essence of crabs while also creating an engaging play of ink tone and brushwork . (See Shi-yee Liu, Straddling East and West: Lin Yutang, A Modern Literatus, New York, 2007, pp. 86-87.)