During this time I became familiar with ‘The Way of the Brush’ as it was through the information contained in Chinese landscape painting that Japanese stone arrangers looked to for methods of organizing highly sophisticated horizontal and vertical tensions in their designs. And in addition to stone appreciation, landscape painting is one of the classical disciplines the Asian scholar engages in. I studied landscape painting and became familiar with the various kinds of brush strokes used to interpret specific kinds of rock formations. This discipline is called ‘Li’ and the essential idea is that the stroke is charged with the same kind of ‘energy’ as the rock outline; smooth, bold, rough, etc. In this method of depicting phenomenon the brush is ‘stroked once’ to achieve the effect. To this day most of my paintings ascribe to this technique. Upon returning to America I spent a year wandering through creek beds and coastal regions in Northern California collecting stones. I joined a Suiseki club as the only Caucasian member and would travel with the club on stone collecting expeditions. I designed modernist trays to hold my arrangements, presented single stones as works of art and presented myself as a stone arranger to a large landscape architectural firm and worked for a year in that capacity. But after years of immersion in an ancient albeit timeless and esoteric practice which still held little relevancy to my own time and place in terms of the role of the contemporary artist in society I felt it was time to move into a different direction. Some of my earliest sculptural designs concerned a relationship between the earth and the effects of humankind’s industry and architecture on the landscape. The question now remained as what kind of architecture would serve as a point of departure. I had always been inspired by Asian architecture and as an exercise in skill I carved a series of Indian Stupas and Chinese Pagodas in stone; thinking that the exercise would be a grounding for further explorations into architectural scale.

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