Note: I have some better picutres of Alan from the opening but for some reason the website won’t  let me

put them in blog

Alan Lau  focuses on nature intimately.`“Walks Along the Kamogawa: The Kyoto Series Part I” gives us lyrical paintings in sumi, watercolor and pastel on rice paper that evoke hanging vines and swirling waters, sometimes birds (tracing migration patterns of small birds) and animals (when the zebra lost her spots).

Immerse yourself in this paintng: arctic ledge

It  suggests different temperatures  in cool grays 

or in the peach orchard with soft pinks, much warmer

“trapped within my garden of longing (in memory of peach blossom spring)” is entirely different in stroke, texture and color. 

The titles, all written in lower case by the artist, suggest a poetic enchantment in themselves.

We can imagine the artist in Kyoto in his “make shift studio in my in-laws’ house…the only room in the house where the sun filters in. Below I see the tiny garden with a lone persimmon tree with orange bursts of fruit and a spindly Japanese tree blushing with red and yellow leaves.”

That quote is from his recent book This Single Road. The book is an experimenatl format, with drawings, writing in script and  printed narrative, making it into a collage. The book includes his observations along the Kawagama river : along the sidewalks beside it he sees  a playground, musicians, seniors doing aerobics , and children in a race. The minuteness of his observations really affected me. I started  doing the same thing,looking at a space with careful observations.