inksound chris nelson art
I work with sumi ink and rice paper, painting fish, birds and insects. I’m really not sure why I paint these things. It’s a very different (and fairly new) activity for me. I think it has to do with my lifelong fascination with fish and insects, and the positive personal association that they have for me. My fascination with birds is new and came about through my interest in their singing. These paintings also have to do with my great admiration for the work of the Ming dynasty artist Bada Shanren. His genius with creating a habitable world that belongs to fish and birds (he must have been a bird or a fish in a previous life), just captured my imagination, and I reluctantly decided to try to do it myself. I constantly fail in this – but I keep at it and make small improvements each year. I’ve been experimenting with mounting my paintings on lampshades so that they can be illuminated from behind. This is a work in progress.
I also work with calligraphy, taking inspiration from Japanese and Chinese ‘wild cursive’ scripts to create my own ‘wild writing’. With my calligraphy, more and more I’ve been interested in disconnecting my hand from the brush when writing. Often I will attach my brush to a long stick, so I have very little control over my writing. My calligraphy has a similar aesthetic approach to my music – I’m striving for a natural expression, as if the writing were created by insects or plants, rather than my hand.
chris@inksound.com
