Month: July 2015

Walking in the big stones.

Keeping up with the day’s activities and having time to reflect has been challenging.  It’s 11pm and I’m just now writing about this visit a couple of days ago in Xi’an.  

The guide book says some may feel underwhelmed by the museum and preserved foundations.  But my skin tingled thinking about being in this very spot 6,000 years ago.  Building a shelter, finding food, water, making a fire, fighting wildcats and bears.  We are told it is believed to have been matriarchal because the burial sites have the remains of women lined up with vessels alongside.

In fact there is a variety and number of clay vessels that keeps me drawing and photographing the pieces.  The larger ones have lids that were used to bury babies.  Inside one of these is a drawing that seems to show the face of a child, eyes closed, with fish on either side of the head, and a large fish shape across the bottom.

And there are so many clay pots.  Xi’an is a city of clay.  Deep yellow.  I want to work more in clay.  So ancient.

July 13, 2015

 

The excavation pits, the beautifully detailed figures, the massive accumulation of artistic effort is staggering. I cannot take it all in. I draw, photograph, listen to our guide. The crowds of Chinese are large and appreciative. I get photographed, interviewed by young Chinese artists. My ambition to focus and be present gives me so much pleasure that I loose my group for an hour. But we have all learned from Tom’s misfortune, and there is a meeting up spot at the arrival gate so I don’t worry. The truth is that I am happy, alone, working, focused, making a drawing that will hold my memories of Xi’an much longer than 500 photographs could. When I am drawing my eye and hand moves along the contour of the object like a very slow ant. I have never looked at a Terracotta horse and drawn it. I do not “know” the form in my eye muscle to hand movement yet. The profile of the kneeling archer is unknown also. The layers of fired and painted clay, 2,000 years old holds me like listening to Ella and Louis. I am fixed. I thank the spirits of the ancestors for this art, this day, this world.

 

I took a trip to this little 14c village, Dangjiacun. Found out about it in Lonely Planet. Absolutely no tourists there. Eerily deserted but beautiful. Art students were scattered around the village drawing and painting. A beautiful active pagoda and temple.

A wonderful city full of the parallel lives of maintaining the ancient Chinese culture dating back 5,000 years and living a thoroughly modern life with cool restaurants in shopping malls that are lively centers of communal dancing, skateboarding, or a walk with your date.  Bicycling on the city wall this morning with a new friend, LeeAnne. She is preparing to take a big exam in traditional Chinese medicine.

 

 

Afterwards we visited the Guangren Buddhist Temple run by Tibetan monks.  The master meets us with golden prayer shawls placed around our necks.

 

The various smaller temples house many beautiful seated Buddhas. There is a large and steady group of devotees lighting incense sticks and offering prayers.

 

I draw a large standing Buddha between 20-25 feet. We are invited to the private library on the second floor of the golden temple. I am so close to the face and hands in a devotional posture. My world focuses in.  Perfect quiet. Just me and the Buddhas’ enormous hands, face, body.

Amazing again.

BEIJING TO XI’AN

A Bullet Train traveling 200 miles an hour takes us southwest to Xi’an today. We pass agricultural fields with many mixed plantings. Very different from fields in the US where you would see only one species growing. Every surface seems cultivated by either homes or agriculture. I keep thinking of Professor Ronald Knapp’s book, House, Home, Family: Living and being Chinese which describes so much of what the Bullet is zooming past; the rural life of China devoted to single family farming. Clusters of houses with groves of trees around them, surrounded by fields of beautifully growing vegetables shining in the hot sunlight. I recognize corn, and perhaps spinach. At dinners we are served cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, spinach, corn, peppers. It is a vegetable rich diet that comes delivered by these farms of the east and south.

The north is arid grasslands and desert. In fact, Harold sends me a link to the Times today that describes the forced evacuation of the nomadic tribes of the North. Trading their culture of sheparding animals and living in tents for the apartments, electricity and jobs that are creating these enormous urban centers.

 

The north is arid grasslands and desert. In fact, Harold sends me a link to the Times today that describes the forced evacuation of the nomadic tribes of the North.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/world/asia/china-fences-in-its-nomads-and-an-ancient-life-withers.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

Trading their culture of sheparding animals and living in tents for the apartments, electricity and jobs that are creating these enormous urban centers.  There are also lots of enormous apartment buildings going up in Xi’an for the workers that will leave the more rural areas to live and work closer to jobs that will bring income to send back home.  The apartment buildings are huge blocks, reminds me a bit of Co-op City.  Can you see the cranes busy at the top?

It is very hot in Beijing, but even hotter in Xi’an, home of the Terracotta Warriors. Tomorrow we head directly for the site.

Amazing huge. I drew and photographed. Wonderful experience inside the pits. Headed to Banpo Neolithic village now.