By contrast, virtually every work in "The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth Century China" warrants its own essay on the composition's literary or political allusions, the lineage of its brushwork, and the personal and historical context in which the painter dipped brush into ink.
He prefers big open spaces, uses the jabbing tone of his trumpet more like a sculptor's knife than a painter's brush, slashing across the canvas of silence.
White can be the paper on which he paints or any number of delicate washes in which we almost feel the painter making certain that the barest amount of pigment will mix with water on his brush.
The cost drops 30% on a Mediterranean hand-painted dinner plate if you get a painter to use a sponge cut in the shape of a leaf instead of laboring over brush strokes.