Painting the Dao

52 Over the years I have painted about one hundred paintings a year, including the many smaller works on western paper which I often do at home in the evenings. Painting is an obsession. I also paint when flying, in hotels, and on occasion, if hijacked into a holiday, on a beach. I have more than one hundred seals, some commissioned from seal art- ists or given to me by them, some bought old for their recyclable meaning, and some carved myself. I am a shameless recycler. There should be a Nobel Prize for Plagiarism as without it civilisation wouldn’t exist; it is impossible to be creative without the creativity that went before us, and I mine it enthusiastically! Even my studio name is recycled. I bought a studio identification by Wu Changshuo and adopted it – The Water, Pine and Stone Retreat – and amusingly was advised by my artist friends that it was not truly Chinese as it had one character too many! I showed them the endorsement of a major early twentieth-century artist and they mumbled that, ah, yes, well occasionally it was all right. Their response had nothing to do, of course, with the number of characters; it was just a reaction to my using them at all. The Nodding Stone Garden was a name given to the family home in Sussex with its glorious gardens by the artist Ho Huai- shuo after staying with us. The Garden at the Edge of the Universe is a Daoist thought, but also a wry nod to Douglas Adams, a favourite author famous for A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and for books about a holistic detective agency, in one of which a character, when asked how he had learned to fly, replied, ‘Easy. You just throw yourself at the ground and miss.’ Visionary artists throw themselves at reality and miss. And then they fly. Should anyone piece my inscriptions together, their common thread would be obvious: they are all, one way or another, about painting the Dao, stepping off the Stage of Time and directly experiencing ‘other worlds’, the wilderness of the imagination, couched in poetic terms, sometimes even as poems following the Chinese tradition. I write Chinese poetry, but not in Chinese.