Painting the Dao

159 a note on s eal s T he master of the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat has over one hundred seals (and counting) to choose fromwhen completing a paint- ing.They range from name seals (his Chinese names and a series of adopted sobriquets) to haiku messages of meaning to poetic sentiments to images. Some he has commissioned from famous seal carvers inHong Kong,Taiwan and China; some were carved by artist friends as gifts; and some are old seals collected over half a century, many of which became appropriate when he began to paint, so he appropriated them.