Zhu Da footprints.

Bada Shanren (born as Zhu Da (朱耷), was a Chinese painter of Shuimohua and a Calligrapher.   

In 2010, Tanguy Dohollau, a french artist, published his graphic novel " Pas à Pas". The story combines intelligently the story of two characters, a blind woman and a Comic creator of Sci-fi, with  the painting of Master Zhu Da and movies made by Andrei Tarkovsky and Ozu.  

(Start panel 7) 

One day, when Zhu Da was a child, his father asked him to go barefoot in a tub full of ink -

Then he asked him to walk on the unrolled paper -

The first footprints of Zhu Da were very black - The paper was drinking the black ink.

Its footprints were thinned at every step - They became almost invisible.

Then, his father took a brush and wrote on the top of the paint roller: "A piece of the path of my son Zhu Da" -

The, at the bottom of the paint roll he added: "By walking we trace our path".

What about you?

By a beautiful fall day, half of the class of Illustration I followed the footsteps of Zhu Ta.

Warren Linn, guest of that day, was the first to dunk his feet in a basin filled with Tempera. "Walking deliberately on the great white beach, he recalled his Latin (...) the road to paradise is paved with paradox". " 

"Saying to himself:

Where goes the world?

To the white

Where goes the white?

to the void

Where goes the void?

the void comes and goes

like the light"

Emily, Amelie, Elise, Kathryn, Sarah, Clare, Cynthu, Chrissy, Rebekah and Jungeun brushed also the paper with their footsteps.

" Moving out then

into the landscape

walking

in the white of the morning

walking and watching

listening

yellow flowers

tossing in the wind

a crow on a branch

caw-cawing

the rivulet

reflecting the sky

in blue-grey ripples

white beach, wrack

the high gait and snootiness

of oyster-catchers

a blue crab groping in a pool

bright shell

the notes accumulate

towards a writing

that has more in view

than the art of making verse

out of blunt generalities

and personal complaining

atlantic archipelago

and a sense of something

to be gathered in

the mind gropes

like a blue crab in a pool

tosses in the wind

reflects the sky in ripples

flies high

leaves signs in the sand

lies recklessly strewn

at the edge of the tide

comes back to the books

the many manuscripts

Scriptorium

In candida casa

altus prosator

binoculars focused also

on the red-roofed

abandoned sardine-factory

at the tip of the promontory -

some kind of homology

a place to work from

(to work it all out)

a place in which to

house a strangeness

this strange activity

(philosophy? poetry?

practice? theory?)

from an accumulation of data

to the plural poem

beyond the generality

" One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk"

Crazy Horse, Oglala Dakota, 1868

Poems above are from "Atlantica", written by Scottish Kenneth White.