spilled Ink

After they cut out my tongue I started writing script.

I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire. I added a little water to a grey stone surface and placed the ink in the center. 

Then, using my right hand, as Master Liu in Chengdu showed me, I turned the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid as a drop of water rippled a pond.

After collecting ink I picked up my long heavy brown brush. Pure white hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper.

I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, my left palm flat on the table with fingers spread. I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink then slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess. 

I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality and character. There are at least 5,000 characters in my written language. I have much to learn and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth.

Painting

Greetings,

'A mountain loses its spirit without cloud, loses its peculiarity without stones, loses its elegance without trees, and loses its life without water, and In painting, one should concentrate the mind, and hold the breath: with concentration of the mind, serenity is maintained; with the breath held up, preciseness is attained.

'One should be as serene as an old monk in meditation, and be as precise as a silk worm in spitting silk. The spirit and real fun of painting are from nature and beyond the brushes and paints.' - Chinese painter

Metta.

Egyptian Art

Greetings, 

These images are from a mural at an Indonesian school where I had 100 ten-year old teachers a year ago. They graduated to Grade 5 and I graduated back to Vietnam and the University of the Street. The kids said, "there's book learning and there's street learning."

read more...

Metta.

old poem

Greetings,

Seeing or watching 
even blind people see
- the tailor on the Saigon sidewalk feeling threads, 
a needle points magnetic north, true north? Such a question.

evolutionary GPS navigational systems inside his fingers

sharp diabolical edges of conversations
laying out splendid contorted plans
program expectancies 
there is so much we do not 
or will not or cannot know

where the inside is hidden
in the outside inside
 

old black and white portraits 
of grandfathers from 1936 Spanish civil war years 
feast or famine centuries

cover walls 
eating grass soup 
grandmothers doing their white 
crochet handicrafts wearing fingernails 
down to the bone into the lentil soup it goes 
under watchful framed wedding dress prop remembering

how it was running with bulls
beneath grateful gladiolus spilling their blood
for tourist images

a day after climbing sharp stones steps
over valleys buried in mountains
to Cueva de la Pileta caves

seeing, feeling, hearing, touching, tasting, absorbing 27,000 year old Paleolithic paintings  
bison, goats, seal, deer, archers, fish, traps, calendars, stalactites, stalagmite organ music

sweeter than dream time ancestor stories
 
dripping water pure pools
hibernating marsupials species specific  
2,300 bats zooming toward night
 
fires for illumination
no cooking
eat it raw
fertility symbols
even the archaeologists 
do not know 
exactly what they mean
calcium carbonate 
copper and iron 
5 cm of animal fat pigment
traces of fingerprints
pure water

releases itself inside mountain

we took tea
near heavy ripe lemons 
spring flowers struggled toward faint sun 
crying words 
sharing silence
pink and white petals dancing in a clear blue sky

Metta.

Andy Warhol

This is from Volume 56, Number 16 - October 22, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books by Richard Dorment. He reviews three new books about the artist Andy Warhol.

...Warhol asked different questions about art. How does it differ from any other commodity? What value do we place on originality, invention, rarity, and the uniqueness of the art object? To do this he revisited long-neglected artistic genres such as history painting in his disaster series, still life in his soup cans and Brillo boxes, and the society portrait in Ethel Scull Thirty-Six Times. Though Warhol isn't always seen as a conceptual artist, his most perceptive critic, Arthur C. Danto, calls him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced."

...Warhol's friend Henry Geldzahler, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recognized that the artist's two great innovations were "to bring commercial art into fine art" and "to take printing techniques into painting. Andy's prints and paintings are exactly the same thing. No one had ever done that before. It was an amazing thing to do."

...As Danto explains in his brilliant short study of Warhol, the question Warhol asked is not "What is art?" but "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?"

New York Review of Books. Read more...

Andy Warhol Museum...

"I don't know where the artificial stops and real starts." - Andy Warhol

Metta.