This is the one bamboo painting I haven't posted. I don't know why...maybe it's because it was my first...This was done in the traditional Chinese style, with Chinese brush and the beautiful "ink stick": a compact stick of solid black ink, which you rub onto a stone with water---a sacred act to the ancients---and make your own 'paint'. It's a whole world, this style; and while I was only a novice at it, it was a peace-giving, beautiful period of my life. I wrote a short tale for it---part of a series of tales I'm attempting, on 'sheltering-in-place'. All you need to know is: This is a Chinese artist, who, after long years as a Western painter, went back to her roots, and painted bamboo. That's all it's about. Not easy to write (for me), because I'm trying to describe the act of making-art. But I hope something comes across, and hopefully make the difficult art of quarantine feel a little more blessed. Thanks for your wonderful visits and responses. I'll be back in the galleries tomorrow. Stay healthy and safe, everyone, and inspired! m * * * She leaned over, peered into the "virgin paper," as her mentors used to call it, thought of her ancestors---a long line of artists, some of whom were monks and nuns, who made calligraphy and ink paintings as if they were sacred acts, and for whom a single stroke was an act of holiness, a "creation of the universe," as her ancestors often said. She thought, "may I be be worthy of them..."; and she prayed that her mother---who was her main mentor, and a great master---would look down on her daughter from wherever she dwelled (she'd passed-on some years back), while her daughter set her brush above the paper, preparing to make that first stroke which was "the planting the seed, the first seed that would sprout a massive forest..." She was filled with enormous awe that she was now entering that world, and that her mother and generations-of-ancestors were somehow with her now... Mind you, she'd painted abstracts, collages, even pop art: But, in recent months, she'd felt called to the roots she'd long left behind. Her mother had introduced her to Bamboo Painting---an ancient art which had numerous manuals and rules, each of them backed by exquisite philosophies and spiritual sayings---and had told her: "If you can create a single bamboo, and honor the wind and the sacred resilience that bamboos impart, you will raise up your ancestors and create the world anew." "Hmm," thought the daughter: Those "old words" of her mother were wise, certainly, but way too fanciful to be taken seriously...But now, as sheltering-in-place weighed down on everyone and she had so much time alone, she felt a sudden yearning for the long and exquisite arcs-of-time her ancestors knew so intimately: the way days and months passed without a peep; long, slow, prodigious time without the interruptions of urban madness, noise and the mania that she lived with every day: Now, with the mere act of holding the brush her mother used, she felt kinship with those "old ones," with her ancestors who experienced time as a long, silent arc, a vast rainbow or a bridge spanning mountains and mountains on the horizon: Time, for them, was prodigious, slow and blissfully peace-giving; and bathed and nurtured in silence. She felt that slow time now, as she pulled out her strange 'ink stick'---that beautifully carved, perfumed block of solid ink that was used by her ancestors---waiting for her to rub it onto the stone. She dipped her brush in water, rubbed it across the ink stick itself---something she wasn't supposed to do; but it felt so visceral and right to feel the strange resistance and heaviness of the stick (as the ink clung to the brush jealously). She held the ink-laden brush over the paper, and, with a prayer her mother had learned, she touched the brush down, and began. Slowly, as if each stroke were a psalm, she painted leaf after leaf, one after the next, one stroke per leaf, one stroke per branch. You learned how to make whole worlds with a mere turn of the brush: no "filling in," in the Western fashion: just a single all-consuming stroke across the page. And, with each stroke, she began to understand 'the world in a grain of sand', or (to quote her ancestors), "in this rock, I find the universe, and in that universe, I find another," (and so on): A single stroke could contain the entire cosmos, in other words: That's what she felt as she painted the leaves one by one. And she whispered: "Do you see, mother? Do you see?" It was strange for a modern atheist-woman to look for her mother, hovering in the shadows: But she did. And she was at peace doing it. And she hoped her mother could 'see' her somehow, by some miracle or arcane magic... * * * When she was finished, she stood back and stared: a decent job, she thought: It didn't have the depth that her mentors had---she was still new to this, after all. But she had entered the sanctuary, nevertheless. And she felt immense power in that lonely brush tip, still laden with that bulging, thick ink, now dripping on the painting. "Yikes!" she rasped, as she yanked the brush away: "My first effort, and I'm dripping all over it!" She glanced at the clock---something her ancestors never did---and realized a few minutes had passed, yet it seemed like many hours. She liked that; she liked the lengthening of time, how it spanned out like a person relaxing for the first time in months, and feeling their muscles stretch out like water or melted butter. "I can do this," she thought, "and every day while this quarantine lasts, I'll find that long arc of time. Maybe this long, dreadful lockdown will bring blessings I never dreamt of..." She picked up the painting---a frail piece of paper which crackled in the breeze out her window---waved it back and forth to dry the ink; and she put the painting on her kitchen table, watched the paper curl as the ink sunk into its fibers and caused them to bulge. "Wonderful!" she thought. Then she opened the window, eyed some friends across the street, and yelled: "I found slow time today!" They---artists too---smiled and bowed. Then they went about their day. And she sat, peering out the window, aware that there could be viruses in those gentle early-spring breezes...but thought, what a gift this air was, as spring slowly crept into her world. (She had her mask, and no one was around her.) The leaves on distant trees suddenly seemed more familiar, more intimate, because of that painting. She went inside, poured hot tea, listened to the crackling of steaming water as it splashed into the cup, as she breathed in the pungent-sweet fragrance of tea and jasmine; and thought that this had become the precious and magically intimate gift of 'sheltering in place', at last... ------------------