Painting the Dao

44 On the other side of the art object the audience refines authenticity as its understanding contributes creatively to the process. The baton is passed, but the end-product of art remains: artist and audience share a creative search for meaning. In the knowing audience this is how art works most efficiently as a metalanguage for self-realisation. The creativity of the audience, endlessly into the future, accesses and interprets the vision of the artist, and thereby enhances comprehension, whether incrementally or as a complete transformation of consciousness. breadth and de pth Traditional Chinese ink paintings of landscapes with tiny figures and the occasional small dwelling can seem boringly similar at the surface. But the knowing audience, steeped in the tradition and seeing past the surface, sees each as excitingly different in the languages of brushwork, form and abstraction. Knowing how to access inner meaning makes all the difference to aesthetic response. I have a seal among the more than one hundred I use on my own paintings that says, ‘Man grinds the ink; ink grinds the man’. The message is clear: artists may grind ink to create, but the act of creativity also ‘grinds’ the artist on the inkstone of experience. The audience then metaphorically grinds its own ink to interpret meaning and refine perception and inner character to match the process of the artist. The neophyte can approach the works of Ni Zan, one of the most famous of fourteenth-century artists, and find pretty much the same painting over and over again, with very little ‘going on’ as subject matter, and certainly no obvious novelty. Yet his brushwork is such that the greatest of later artists stand in awe of it, recognising in it not only pure essence in the ink-painting tradition, but essence of the artist’s character and vision. CC Wang, steeped in his own literati tradition, bowed metaphorically to his supreme brushwork until the day he died. He summed up the nature of essence succinctly: To understand Chinese painting is not a simple matter.There is guangdu , complexity or breadth, and shendu , depth – these are two aspects in the appreciation of Chinese painting. Breadth includes the pictorial topic, the artist’s [surface] message. Depth refers to the inner spirit of the work and the personality of brushwork. The artist may prefer one aspect or the other. That is his choice. The viewer has the same option. It is