Painting pictures is a nice change of pace for me. What I usually do is write very long books. My books involve a lot of research and require numerous rewrites. My forthcoming novel, To Chase the Glowing Hours (Regal House, Fall 2025), was in the making for twelve years before I received a contract to publish it. In contrast, I can usually create an ink painting in less than an hour. There’s a clear beginning, middle, and end to the process that feels very satisfying to me.

            I love the spontaneity of ink painting. I love the aesthetic of the art form. I love its simplicity. The goal of Chinese and Japanese ink painting is to capture the essence of something in a few bold strokes. You try to tap into the energy of your subject matter. You add only the details you want to be there.

            I’ve enjoyed making art ever since I was in high school, though I’ve let years lapse in which I did no drawing or painting. Twenty-three years ago, soon after my twins were born, I decided I wanted to learn Chinese ink painting. My family’s house has a view of a lake, and seeing the mist over that lake on cold winter mornings motivated me to paint the scene.

            I tried using regular watercolors on sturdy watercolor paper. To convey the mood of the mist and water, I diluted the paint. But I could not stop myself from outlining. My paintings looked tight and rigid. I remembered the softness of Chinese paintings on silk, the dark mountains emerging from clouds. How did those ancient Chinese artists create their atmospheric effects? My urge to learn their techniques was very strong.

            Through a Chinese community center, I found a teacher. His name was Long Gao and he taught out of his home. He’d been a professor of art in Beijing before moving to the U.S. His wife taught piano. Out of their many art and music students, most of them children, I was the only one who did not speak Chinese.

            A stay-at-home mother, I had babysitting help twice a week for stretches of four hours. Once a week for several years, I had a private lesson from Long Gao. He is a phenomenal artist and a wonderful teacher. Ink painting is only one of his many mediums. He is well known as an oil painter and as a sculptor.

            Teacher Gao sold me a large sheep-hair brush, and two other brushes that were a combination of horse-hair, wolf-hair, and badger-hair. He showed me how to soak my brushes in water, and how to flex them so they’d slowly absorb the black ink. I learned that if I could load the ink on my brush in a certain way, each stroke I made on the rice paper presented several tonal values.

            One of the first subjects I learned to paint was bamboo. We began with the stalk. “Paint in the direction that the bamboo is growing,” Teacher Gao said. He showed me how to push the brush forward, pausing between segments. “Paint with the energy of the heart going out through your arm, into your hand, and into the brush,” he taught me. Over time, I realized I was learning a spiritual practice akin to meditation, and that it was very important to paint from a state of inner quiet.

            One week, Teacher Gao placed a three-sided rock on his art table to serve as inspiration for painting mountains. Numerous mountains could be painted without dipping the brush into more ink. When the brush became drier, its ink came out lighter on the page. The lighter ink worked well for painting the suggestion of distant peaks. To create clouds or mist, I simply needed to leave white space between the forms of my mountains and peaks. This was the answer to the question that had started me on my journey of ink painting.

            Teacher Gao carved my beautiful chops (printing stamps). He created an image of twin birds in honor of me being the mother of twins. The other image, designed with Archaic Chinese characters, is a Buddhist name I was given many years ago by a Soto Zen master in New York: Ro-ki (Japanese) or Ro-chi (Chinese), meaning “bright life force.”

            I was very lucky to have studied traditional ink painting with Teacher Gao, and I think of him every time I “sign” my paintings in red with the chops that he made.