art

the dawn is here…

In the summer night
The evening still seems present,
But the dawn is here.
To what region of the clouds
Has the wandering moon come home?

~Kiyohara no Fukayabu

Meditative photography with an iPad, John F Simon’s “Drawing your own Path,” a pair of reading glasses, a fountain pen, and the dawn.  Edited in Lightroom CC.

lines & shapes

street-3web

Nikon D750     f/22     1/25     35mm     800 ISO

“…after trying for so long to program computers to make drawings autonomously, I noticed one key factor that distinguished me from the machine: I wanted to make a good drawing. The first step in making a good drawing is recognizing and giving voice to the desire to create. The creative urge is the engine that will drive the great effort it takes to pursue art over the long term, and understanding the nature of this desire will be critical in staying motivated long enough to develop good work.

“…What makes a drawing good? It would be impossible to list all the qualities of a good drawing, and in any case the list would be different for each of us and each artwork we liked. Luckily, we don’t need a precise definition. We understand how to proceed with our creative work by developing our intuition and learning to pay attention to what we value and respond to.”

~J F Simon, Jr (Drawing Your Own Path)

the quatrain of seven steps

abstract-1web

People burn the beanstalk to boil beans,
filtering them to extract juice.
The beanstalks were burnt under the cauldron,
and the beans in the cauldron wailed:
“We were originally grown from the same root;
Why should we hound each other to death with such impatience?

~Cao Zhi

I was introduced to the Quatrain of Seven Steps while watching, The Advisors Alliance, a 2017 Chinese two-part television series based on the life of Sima Yi, a government official and military general who lived in the late Eastern Han dynasty and Three Kingdoms period of China.

The poem itself is written in the traditional ”five-character quatrain” style and is an extended metaphor that describes the relationship of two brothers and the ill-conceived notion of one harming the other over petty squabbling.