Bamboo Mountain, Potato Hill

Bamboo Mountain, Potato Hill
Diptych
Gouache and acrylic on paper mounted on birch panels
12" h x 24" w
2012

Other than The Laundry Maze, I've also started working on my new painting project, Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie, a series of diptychs that will be exhibited in Seattle in September and in Portland in November. The first piece is Bamboo Mountain, Potato Hill, a nostalgic look at one of my favorite foods from when I was growing up in Taiwan (fresh bamboo shoots) and how much I missed it when I first moved here. Both the bamboo shoot and potato are root vegetables that are fairly inexpensive (in the proper regions), and both are very versatile in terms of culinary use.

I did not return to Taiwan for 7 years, and one of the first things my grandmother made for me was bamboo shoot soup!

Here's a shot of how it started. You can see that I'm playing with some ideas that I ended up not using (the drawing of a sprouted potato on the lower right).



The bamboo's cellular architecture and the potato flower are both 5-segmented. And I use this 5-segment structure as starting points. I'm using sacred geometry to denote many things -- the cosmos, the planet, the divider and unifier of the two sides/panels, but also to create a sense of myth and mystery. But it also gives me the pleasure of playing with patterns, which I love to do.

Here it is, fairly far along.



And the finished piece is the top photo.