Dancing by the Moon

One night in August some years ago, I took nearly a hundred photos of the moon over the Eagle Lake at the Blue Mountain Center. That night, I walked from my studio without a flashlight. I could feel the cool light from the moon even in the woods. I didn’t want to go to my room, so I came to the dock.

I was staring at the moon, contemplating, feeling the shining light on my skin, and listening to every sound in the quiet night. Then, I don't know why, but I started waving my camera towards the moon as the shutter opened and closed slowly (set at night mode). Soon I was waving my arms and hands frivolously with a camera, almost crazed by the cool moonlight. I pressed the shutter again and again while jumping and flipping my arms like someone possessed by a demon. Each images was unpredictable, lines made by my body movement. (And obviously, I was having fun, thinking that I was all alone.)

The next morning at the breakfast table, someone asked me what kind of dance I was doing on the dock last night. (She was a writer who had a very nice room overlooking at the lake. At BMC, writers are given better rooms with the lake views, while artists’ rooms are the former maid quarters in the back because we’re given separate studio spaces. I completely forgot about those writers who could probably see me on the dock last night.)  

A week or two weeks later, back in the studio, I started making a series of small paintings based on these photographs. I called them “Moon drawings” back then, but they’re actually paintings. This was one of my first attempts to use iwaenogu (mineral pigment used in traditional Japanese paintings.) On each panel, Japanese rice paper called “Mashi” was stretched over carefully, then prepared with a couple of layers of gofun mixed with suihi enogu (inexpensive pigment usually used for preparing the surface. Then, it was painted with iwaenogu, which is the mixture of ground special ore in color. Each color (pigment) must be prepared before you can use them. It requires mixing with nikawa, an animal glue. I don’t want to spend too much time here to describe the whole process, except to say that it requires a great patience and it is labor intensive. Though I enjoyed the process while I had time to do so, but normally I cannot use these materials unless I have a whole day (week or even month) of uninterrupted time. I found a nice short video on how to prepare iwaenogu on YouTube (just to give you some ideas what I’m talking about…)

Moon painting: Each 6"x 6". Iwaenogu on Kumohada Mashi paper over board.