My darling partner Betty's, niece, Mira, explained to me a little about oriental calligraphy and of course I can't remember all the details but the conversation affirmed that their is an entire culture and a large part of the world that has the wonderful ability to think of the written language as a visual language of pictures or ideograms, fascinating. what an intrinsically artistic culture that must be as compared to our lineal alphabet inherited from the easterly direction of Sumera.
I've often signed things with my name followed by a quick cartoon of a horse head. I ramped that up to an ideogram to look like the above illustration. Now I have it in mind to explore what that would look like in a 3 demensional piece of sculpture. probably welded metal.
After taking a workshop from master brush builder Glenn Grishkoff, I made myself some brushes using bamboo handles and various brush materials. These images were created with ringtail cat hair.
I find contemplating brushwork to expand upon the western process of picture making. "Seeing" is one thing but implementing the "Zen" of the brush stroke is another consideration entirely. I find on 'youtube' demonstrations of chinese landscape painting that reflects the inherent consideration of the brushstroke as well as definition of a landscape done with black ink filters the effort of landscape painting down to its essentials. To combine the two i.e. occidental and oriental landscape techniques is a challenging aspiration.
