blending east and west

Crane, Dragonfly and Bird, ink and watercolor on paper.  In my tireless quest to adapt Chinese painting techniques and materials to more modern content, I find myself recombining and juxtaposing certain elements with alarming regularity.  My Chinese calligraphy has probably benefitted more than other elements of my painting from being in China this last year.  Hopefully my brushwork also gets better over time.  It should all peak when I am on my deathbed.  This painting has the Chinese phrase that can roughly be translated, `A success measures their own strength and then acts'.  The loose brush strokes transport this painting from just a post-modern ironic narrative to something a touch more visceral.

Owl in a tree (with a detail of the owl)

This is one of the large painting I have been working on. It measures about 4'x7'. It hangs as a scroll. I'm trying to figure out how to mount large scrolls by myself. It is labor intensive and I definitely haven't perfected it yet. This one has a respectable amount of negative space for the viewer to fill with whatever it is they look to fill empty spaces with.

The Demise of the Newspaper

I'm excited about the upcoming show at Pittock Mansion this summer through the fall. It is called Uncertain Times and is about the demise of the newspaper industry. I will have an installation in the show. It will be a large (the larger the better) pile of newspaper I have used to practice Chinese calligraphy on. The two paintings above will also be in the show.

Forest Diptych with Lady and Sandy

The idea behind this forest scene was to take advantage of ink and washes by contrastign the dark trees in front with the lighter trees in back. I am also contrasting the relatively fine brushwork done on Lady and Sandy (You can decide which is Lady and which is Sandy) with the brisk loose brushwork of the trees. The Calligraphy couplet roughly translates, `I know my character makes it hard for me to conform. I like that I belong to no-one.' I used the li style of calligraphy.

Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form

This is one of the key concepts of Zen Buddhism. Deceptively simple. Deceptively meaningless. Form and emptiness are the same thing. It is one of those freeing existential concepts, particularly apropos to painting where you use lines and color and empty space to give the illusion of something. I built these two paintings around my walking script calligraphy renditions of the characters form and emptiness.

NUTS!?!

Nuts!?! was just completed this morning 12/6/08. It's one of those paintings I do which almost looks like an old-school Disney illustration. Of course, I want my creative output to be pithier and edgier than a commercial illustration, but the paintings take on a life of their own. I tend to anthropomorphize animals usually by giving them big, searching eyes. Don't we all want to see a bit of ourselves in any random rodent? In a painting course I took at Yale the teacher excoriated me for the illustrative quality of my work. I had just finished 3 years of studying Chinese painting and calligraphy in Taiwan and was a bit older than my Yale classmates. It was too late. I had plotted my artistic course and wouldn't be changed by some abstract expressionist.