Portrait
Looking at the names of sketching strokes
in Chinese art, I see the country:
Ancient wavy silk thread
String
Iron wire
Moving cloud and flowing water
Leech
Nail-head, rat-tail
Wedge
Broken reed
Olive
Date pit
Willow leaf
Bamboo leaf
Shaking ripple
Earthworm
(click on images to see them bigger)
Away from jet airplanes,
computers, and CNN
is a garden in Suzhou.
A child waits there,
quiet and pure as a peach.
Alone on the bamboo bridge
hunched over from the weight of her pack,
an old woman layered in rags
wails her story to the trees.
Behind the dense green curtain of bamboo
her audience listens:
fifty thousand stone Buddhas,
donors, and Bodhisattvas,
carved one thousand years ago.
For a moment I leave Dazu thinking
of the opera house back home.
Fragments, Fadings and Feelings
Mills College Art Museum
When I was in China the abstract beauty of calligraphy intrigued me. I bought some children’s textbooks on how to write Chinese script. For centuries the children have learned how to write by copying characters within boxes in order to understand their structure and proportions.
I started to copy the lessons. Soon my strokes freed themselves from the grid. The “correct” version of the letters was replaced by the “wrong” solution. Using sumi ink, wax and acrylic paint on xuan paper I put down marks. The shapes and colors mixed and spread into new compositions and brushstrokes. The biomorphic forms of nature took over.
As I painted I thought of the world’s largest hydroelectric dam on the Yangtze River. The Three Gorges Dam transformed the river into a deep reservoir flooding farmland, cities, villages and archaeological sites. People were relocated to new structures of mass produced design, buildings with slick, cold, white tile.
Today’s mass production and permanency of materials is replacing an intuitive expression of life. These paintings are made of materials that are vulnerable to the effects of weathering and our touch. The sun will fade some of the brilliant colors into muddy earth tones. Fragile paper will tear. But the way xuan paper transmits light, the way people carried out their everyday life on the Yangtze. These memories will stay in my heart.
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Small monkeys lash their tails,
watch with sharp round eyes
as I walk through the temple.
Colin and I went to China in May 2002. We were on one of the last cruises through the Three Gorges Passage. Our cruise took us from Chongquing to Wuhan. We saw the construction site of the hydroelectric dam which has transformed the valley into a deep, current less reservoir. Eight thousand archaeological sites have disappeared. More than a million people were moved from their homes. 28,000 acres of farmland and around 20 cities and towns have been submerged. I wrote the poem when I came home.
The Yangtze: Three Gorges
Coiled with mist, the cliffs rise
half a mile into the sky.
Looking up, past the trackers’ path,
past the hanging coffins, past the caves,
past the stunted trees,
I see deep blue sky.
Rising Cloud Peak.
Sage Spring Peak.
The riverboat passes villages, orange groves,
fields of pink peach blossoms.
Tall limestone walls dwarf the town.
The river roars.
Winding narrowness,
shallow rapids,
dangerous whirlpools,
currents,
followed by quiet.
Head Rapid.
Chicken Wings.
Fish inscribed on White Crane Ridge:
two carp facing upstream,
one with a lotus sprig in his mouth,
mark ancient low-water levels.
On the road: barbers, plumbers, food sellers.
A welder creates jewelry with his blowtorch,
fired by a garden hose and a bottle of gasoline,
his foot pressing the bellows.
Under a red umbrella a woman sleeps,
sweet slices of watermelon by her side.
Children squat with a deck of cards.
Small groups of people eat noodles out of bowls.
Dressed in a tattered gown of silk
embroidered with dragons, an old man
sits near a persimmon tree.
All this will be underwater soon:
the temple with its wooden pavilions,
pagodas, loggias, reflecting pool,
the monkeys scampering among altars;
the storefronts, streets, houses, fields of rice.
Goddess Peak.
Witches’ Gorge.
What will happen to the Siberian cranes,
the white flag dolphin, the Chinese sturgeon,
the house tucked under a tree?
What will happen to the barbers, sellers, plumbers,
the little girl in yellow jelly shoes,
her mother selling Camel cigarettes?
In a home in Suzhou I saw this poem
on a piece of wood shaped like a banana leaf:
My mind-heart is like the reflection of the moon
in a deep pond on a snowy night
my creativity blooms like flowers
after the spring rain
The old towpath clings to the rockface, high
on the north side of the mountain.
Trackers pulling boats on the Yangtze
sing back and forth, strange chanting melodies.
For centuries Chinese children have learned calligraphy by writing characters within boxes in order to understand their structure and proportions. When I was in China I bought children’s text books on calligraphy. Each work page shows a correctly drawn character. The children copy this in a graph under an image illustrating the word. The characters luck, long life and grandfather are represented here. The two dimensional chart and stencils give a nice balance to the three dimensional portrait. The image came from one of my photographs of a farmer we met while walking in the countryside. He had five children. Later we learned he had seven. Two were girls but they didn’t count.
‘Grandfather’ mixed media on canvas 36″x26″
I chose this painting today because this is how I feel. I have a new computer and all my images have changed color! I should just paint and leave the computer to my son. When I ask him how to blog he gives me a lot of help and then he says, ” just do it” so I’m going to give blogging a try. My goal is to enter a blog once a week so check in and see what happens.
‘Cry’ oil/acrylic on canvas 36″x26″ 2006
