“The Path” includes getting 23 paintings to City Hall in Bill’s big new truck!
It is an honor to be selected by the City of Encinitas Civic Art Program for this exhibit. I understand that over a thousand local artists apply each year, yet only a few are chosen to show art works in City buildings. I was given City Hall, which is like Grand Central Station to little Encinitas – lots of visitors all day long. A great venue to showing off my humble artworks.
“Tao” (or “Dao”) means path or ‘the way’ in Chinese and Japanese. The concept is broad and encompasses both the spiritual and the pragmatic. For me, it represents my own artistic development as I continue to study Asian brush painting and pass from a student who copies to an emerging professional artist with my own interpretation of the techniques and with my own authentic style.
Even the language used to describe this art form has evolved for me since I began in 1985. It started as Chinese Brush Painting. Later, I referred to my style as contemporary Asian brush painting, as my influences were also very Japanese, and most certainly, my aesthetic is more Japanese than Chinese, and my style was becoming more modern. Somehow the term brush persists. Why is that? Can we imagine painting with ink on rice paper without a brush? Today, with fresh, ingenious influences from young, hip artists in China, the genre is ink painting. See? The term brush has disappeared. It’s all about the ink.
