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.

Hello Kitty, Paintings with Words

I've been putting a lot of words into my paintings lately. Hello Kitty is one example. I think doing a lot of paintings with Chinese calligraphy in them has inspired me to use English....especially since most people who see the paintings don't read Chinese.

Rabbit in the Snow

For this painting, I was trying to adapt the traditional Chinese ink painting technique of painting a snowy scene. Snow is the absence of ink or color in traditional Chinese landscape painting. It was fun to suggest a landscape with just a dozen or so quick brushstrokes.

Dante's Love Orbs

This is a second attempt to paint a self-portrait in the style of a Tibetan Thanka painting. The opposing fish help shed some light on the theme of the painting. The first fish is saying, "Give Dante a fish and it's a meal." The second fish is saying, "Teach Dante to fish and he feeds his ego." This painting points out some of Dante's character flaws while at the same time showing some of his more endearing qualities.

Dante Meditating in a Cave

This is another possible painting for my September PCC show. It is modeled on traditional Chinese ink paintings of meditating monks. In reality, I have never been good at a sustained meditation practice. I should perhaps go to a cave for a length of time and try.

Ben, Pink and the Sentimental Sturgeon

I finished this yesterday afternoon after attending a Second Friday opening at Launchpad gallery Friday night. Ben Pink, Launchpad's owner, put together a great evening, so I decided to dedicate this 16"x20" ink and watercolor on paper painting to him. I have been working on illustrations for the Dao De Jing, so I decided to put in one quote from Laozi's text in this painting. The quote is translated and explained at http://daodejingillustrated.blogspot.com/ . I was trying very hard to make every line I comitted to paper have some grace and power. As dependent as my paintings are on narrative content, it is really the brushstroke, in abstraction, that holds potential. For me, the line is the closest thing you will get to the human touch from a painting. Each brushstroke is me trying to express something that is hopefully worth expressing.

He Fell For Love

I finished this a few days ago. I decided not to use color in this painting, just ink stroked onto the xuan paper with a wolf-hair brush. The power of the line can come through better without color stealing the show. The size of the painting, 12"x 30" is conducive to the cool drama of someone falling from the sky. Portland's Steel Bridge and iconic street lamps create space. The grasping hands add emotion. The oversized cat is silly. The bee and ambulance add danger. The falling gull enhance the out of control feeling. The happy girl is what it is all about.

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.