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Brush Fire with Animals Fleeing by Hua Yen |
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Brush Fire with Animals Fleeing by Hua Yen |
Mute black night,
Sudden fire.
Destruction.
Disaster strikes at its own time. It is so overwhelming that we can do nothing other than accept it. It alters the course of our day, our work, our very thinking. Although it is tempting to resent disaster, there is not much use in doing so. We cannot say that a disaster had malice toward us, though it might have been deadly, and it's hard to say that it has "wrecked" our plans: In one stroke it changes the very basis of the day.
Disaster is natural. It is not the curse of the gods, it is not punishment. Disaster results from the interplay of forces; the earthquake from pressures in the earth, the hurricane from wind and rain, even the accidental fire from a spark. We rush to ask "Why?" in the wake of a great disaster, but we should not let superstition interfere with dispassionate acceptance. There is no god visiting down destruction.
Disasters may we change us deeply, but there will pass. We must keep to our deeper convictions and remember our goals. Whether we remain ash or become the phoenix is up to us.
disaster
365 Tao
Deng Ming-Dao
Daily Meditations
Brush Fire with Animals Fleeing
Hua Yen
China
18 century A.D.
Album leaf mounted as hanging scroll
ink and color on paper
20 3/4 x 21 PaintingHua Yen was born in Lin-t'ing, Fuchien province, but moved to Hangchou and then Yangchou, both major painting centers in the early eighteenth century. He was very active with a group of artists who had been involved in various ways with the late seventeenth-century painter Tao-chi. By the 1730s, Hua Yen's compositions follow those of that master of the spontaneous and unexpected.
"Hua Yen is a major, very versatile artist of the first half of the eighteenth-century . . . and very famous now. Quite a lot of his work is around, but this is a very special subject. [When I bought this work] it looked kind of coarse, with a five-character title, plus the seal of Hua Yen, but no signature. And it was not published. [However] the animals are very sensitively painted. You can see through the smoke and fire and see the line of red fire going across. [There is] wonderful use of ink, a highly unconventional painting. In this period, in Yangchou, and in eighteenth-century painting generally, something gives way in the restrictions on subject matter and suddenly they could do things with sort of ominous or painful overtones. This has become a favorite painting, partly because it breaks the rules. Over the years, as I have said to many people now, I have come to value more the odd corners, the dissidents, the unorthodox, I mean people who really break the rules. There are lots of painters in Yangchou who are eccentric, but [I mean] painters who really break new ground, like this one."