Moon Hut Waterfall - oil on canvas 22” x 15” 1983-84
Paintings like this one are a reference to the
fact that I cannot copy nature - I can only make a landscape painting or a portrait, or a still life, etc. I can I can never separate image making from writing
(there is always a brush and an idea...) there-
fore my art consciously references the schools of
literary ‘scholar-painters’ in China and New York.
In China, this school of “literati” or gentleman’s
painting is admiringly called the “Southern School”
even when many of the artists lived in the north.
Its opposite, the professional-artisan school, is
called “Northern.” Buddhism’s greatest triumphs
were in the North and with them appeared the
greatest efflorescence of public and figural art --
while the Southern School remained a stronghold
of landscape painting and Taoist thought.
This painting alludes to the roots of Chinese
landscape painting like Fan Kuan’s: Travelers
among Mountains and Streams, Northern
Sung period, early 11th century.
