Splashed Ink Landscape, by Mike Dillon

Splashed Ink Landscape, by Sesshū Tōyō (Japan). 1495.

Splashed Ink Landscape, by Sesshu (Japan) c. 1495

A quick brush has extracted a foreground tree from a grisaille of mist.

Beyond, smooth rocks rise toward Heaven. Rocks of harmony, beauty and repose
where a holy hermit like Cold Mountain might live. Many possibilities exist even
with grayscale and a playful approach to perspective and proportion.

Stop.

The painting says none of this. Look, simply look at the picture. Can you?

Quick, bolt the door before the mind barges in. Difficult, isn’t it, to simply look, to be
right there when brush touches paper?

Mike Dillon

Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. He is the author of four books of poetry and three books of haiku. Several of his haiku were included in Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, from W.W. Norton (2013). Departures, a book of poetry and prose about the forced removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor will be published by Unsolicited Press in April 2019.
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