"When a Chinese painter paints a tree, he becomes a tree."
This quote stood out to me because of what I'm doing right now; my haiku is about trees, and to illustrate it I've been using prints of my hands and fingers. As I was working the other night I stopped and stared at my handprints and thought, where'd those come from? They don't look like my hands at all! I feel like, in a way, I must transform myself into a tree. I think the idea of the artist undergoing a metamorphosis is especially poignant when you're directly using your body to create marks and forms. Perhaps my interpretation of that quote is too literal, but I find it interesting that, through a simple act like making marks on paper with ink, my hands can transform into gnarled branches.
I didn't think of that when I assigned the reading - but you certainly are fulfilling that quote.
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