Painting the Dao

46 our homes require that we change our guests to make the art seen: ‘Wow! Is that a Picasso?’ Our initial impulse as viewer is to roll through the whole scroll to see what happens . Having done that, if it intrigues as art, we roll back and forth, viewing shorter or longer sections as fancy and the painting take us, in effect composing multiple pictures as viewer-artist, and paralleling the experience of cinema. Having seen what happens, we shift our atten- tion to how it happens, to the languages of line, form, colour, texture, confidence and sagacity, and beyond to their ineffable union in transforming consciousness. Once the process lesson of the handscroll is understood, it can be applied to any other aspect of creative response to experience. It is a key that opens the doors of aesthetics. brush in hand I use a transcultural range of papers, but a favourite of late is cloud- dragon paper made in Taiwan, a skin-thin cotton paper, absorbent and with tiny cotton threads pressed into the surface, mostly on one side, which I tend to think of as the ‘back’. Western papers are generally opaque and the artist chooses a side and sticks to it; Chinese papers are generally translucent when wet and more flexible. I make marks initially with fairly large brushes, the ancient, gnarled and weathered sages of the brush pot, part of studio ambience as well as being tools pressed regularly into service. I dip the brush in the water pot on the painting table, add pigments to the side and tip of the brush and make marks. That is when the control of the uncontrollable begins: dancing with the brush, turning it this way and that, pushing it into the paper to break up the brush-head, all without specific intention, though having done it so many times before there is always an element of intention in mind, just not one to which I cling. If one is painting the Dao, painting the nature of nature, clinging is antithetical, a negation of the Dao. If an intriguing possibility suggests itself, I follow it. After turning the paper over to consider which side offers the greatest potential, usually the reverse of the side first marked, I add a second layer, often using a finer brush to draw out whatever appeared in the suggestive abstract marks. Occasionally I draw what I see in the marks with charcoal first. A friend once gave me a box of charcoal as a birthday present and I have been amazed to see how long the sticks have lasted, long beyond my