“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...
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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...
Unable to find flowers for today’s arrangement, to accompany the preparation of tea, I instead hung this scroll I painted of bamboo. I mounted this using Japanese silks in a Muramachi era Kake-mono style . The seal is one...
Staring out the window in my dining room, watching the clouds roll in over the mountains from the sea, I was inspired to hang an old painting from my collection. I wrote “layers of cloudy peaks” in large characters,...
Digging in the crates of hanging scrolls I made while living in Taiwan, I came across one of my first ink paintings I painted, while living in Tian MU. Two friends sit beneath a mountain peak by the water,...