The painting subject for this week (beginning April 13, 2020) is tenkei (people in landscapes) [点景]
A broader meaning for tenkei is landscape painting with some element added that enhances the painting. Small people in a painting of a waterfall, for example, can make the waterfall seem much larger. The element(s) can be people, animals, houses, boats, furniture or any number of other things. When it is people, the word becomes tenkei jinbutsu (点景人物). These added elements should always be small and simply rendered. Otherwise, they become distractions. Such things are very common in oriental landscape paintings. Some of the most famous such paintings were done by the ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world—Japanese woodblock prints) artists Hokusai and Hiroshige. They can easily be found on the web.
Landscape paintings are always comprised of a foreground (kinkei [近景]), middle ground (chūkei [中景]), and background (enkei [遠景]). There are different ways of signifying these elements. In many oriental landscape paintings done centuries ago, the background was painted at the top of the picture, the foreground at the bottom, and the middle ground in between with negative space separating the three elements. Most landscape paintings today blend the three elements together with subtle clues that create the illusion of depth. One of the uses of tenkei is to provide such clues.