“Black is the absence of all color You can’t mix it from paint You have to fabricate it, Out of burnt bones or burnt pine, soot Black is hue, when you work with hues only a black and white...
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“The major decisions in the process of painting, are on the ground of truth not taste…. you follow the dictates of your passions, and it is only by giving yourself up completely to the medium that one find oneself...
Ink is a presentation of passions after the fact. There is the stark and bitter recognition that something has happened and nothing can alter its having happened, like the black marks made by lightning strikes on a tree.
Ink has a depth rarely seen in art or nature It shines, glows, moves and imposes itself on the spectator, the work and the artist. It does what the artist asks: a projection of his total self
Continuing to read through the poems of Xu Wei, the swashbuckler, poet and painter of the late Ming Dynasty, I came across this poem: Brandishing short sword and pistol, we surround them at dusk A cold wind blows the...
My friend Sun Shi Lun gave me a book of poems by the late Ming painter Xu Wei徐渭. I have always been a fan of his paintings, beautiful ink lotus leaves, a melody in shades of grey and black....
Black ink: the protagonist, the bridge to the past, the void where we all come from and return to the color of the ancients marking their existence around them Sensual, expressive, tragic, sensible, joyful, elegant, the shadow left behind...
Color as light, the medium for all that we see, the blue: cobalt, ultra-marine, Prussian, the colors of the California sky The red: setting sun at dusk
Grinding an ink stick on a stone shaped like the “wind” its fragrant smell fills the room connects me to the calligraphers of the past who have been grinding their own ink before they begin to write stretching back...