Watercolors
Growing up super engaged in the academic world in my early years, I never thought I would become an artist, even though I loved and excelled in all the art classes. It’s when I started to draw with my young daughter Shen-Qi, that I started to feel that I am indeed an artist. That it’s possible, it’s doable, and it’s real. At that time, I was 35. This realization and the practice of watercolor has totally shifted my direction of life. Now, whenever I am making art, or appreciating a piece of artwork, I feel that I am in love. In a sense, the connection and creation of art has made myself a better and truly living person in many great ways: more curious, passionate, open, appreciative and relatable, and most importantly, kinder and wiser. It opened myself up to higher and broader dimensions of myself, of other people, of life, of the entire world in general.
MY RELATIONSHIP TO THE WORK
Watercolor brings me in touch with the softest, most humane, intuitive and fluid part of me, and that part of mother nature.
Once in Matte Long’s pottery workshop at Saratoga Clay Art Center, he asked us to describe the feeling of softness; I said silk. He said that to him, it’s like the skin of the dolphin. Now whenever I hold his cups, I felt I am hugging or being hugged by a dolphin, and just floating in the ocean!
Now, at my home / studio / sanctuary, I would say that soft feeling is like painting a piece of watercolor - the feeling when the brush swirls gently in the water, the colors swirl and dance in the water, and then merge and immerse themselves on the paper. The feeling of watching these happenings is all very soft.
Working with watercolor brings me deep into that practice of trust, letting go and surrender. To trust the intelligence of the spirit of art itself, and many times, just let the water and the color do its own work, refraining from controlling and our perfectionist mindset and habits - to let the water run the course itself, to do less, to appreciate it more, and give space.
Somehow, this is universal to all creative process, not only art and watercolor. Yet to me watercolor just embodies it so fully and sensitively, in an almost mystical way. Watercolor chooses me and I choose watercolor.
What chooses you? And what will you choose?
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