Gallery: Post 9/11

Twelfth Night was commissioned for a museum tour Nihonga exhibit in Japan (To-ki-Michi, A Survey of Contemporary Nihonga, Ueno Royal Museum, Hakodate Museum, Ishikawa Prefectural Museum, and twelve other museums throughout Japan.) I overlapped a Shakesperian title with 12th, a day after 9/11.  This is an elergy in the form of a weeping cherry, Japanese symbol ephemeral beauty and now my personal symbol of enduring hope during dark times.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Little Gidding)

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

T.S.  Eliot, Four Quartets

Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,

Not in the scheme of generation.

Where is the summer, the unimaginable

Zero summer?

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Golden Fire was exhibited in 2007 in Chelsea, New York City.  It is in the background of Ibarra&Fujimura: Live Painting in New York. Greg Wolfe wrote:  

That the culminating work to this sequence should be a monumental piece entitled “Golden Fire” has a sort of epic inevitability about it.  Gold is the quintessential element we think of as requiring the refiner’s fire.  It is a heavy substance that somehow lifts into what the writer Milan Kundera has called “the unbearable lightness of being.”  This element, found deep within the earth and created thought he turbulent processes of change, becomes something that symbolizes the eternal and unchanging.  Gold is the possession of kings, and yet we often speak of the common person as having a heart full of it.