So as an amateur painter you would be painting using just ink and usually paper sometimes silk is more expensive.

But you're deliberately sort of deskilling what you're doing because

it's supposed to be amateur you're not supposed to be selling it like an academic

painter who might work with expensive mineral pigments and so that's kind of where some of the ink painting, the more abstract,

an intellectually freighted images are coming from that tradition. And so it's sort of the idea

is not that you're painting a memetic representation of something is that you're painting the essence of something because you're so cultivated that you can commune with the bamboo and the trace the gestural brush work the ink on the paper you

only get one chance you don't get a paint over that that's it you make your

mark and that's it so you have to be so prepared internally that when you put your

paintbrush on the on the paper it goes where it needs to go and expresses this

you know this resonance between the man and the bamboo for example.

So there's also extraordinarily modern.

Yeah, very modern, yeah.

But also very, very old.

And it's the same with calligraphy,

you know, it's the trace of the person in the moment.

So there's a long history of that.

I still don't think the goal is very similitude. I think it's in the service of something more and I think that in general

Japanese painting is often about what is painted and it makes you it makes it very clear that it's an image

and that an image is doing something

and it's not just a sort of window

onto something you could see with your eyes.

This is something you see with more than your eyes.

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