This latest showing of Speech of the Gods at the Hervey Bay Regional Gallery was adapted to be a special tribute to Dr. Lawrence Chan, Surgeon, Artist, Calligrapher and my Chinese mentor of over two decades who has had a profound influence on my artistic development.

The idea came about because I was able to secure Dr Lynn Arnold AO to open this exhibition and he is a very dear friend of Dr Chan (who unfortunately has been in a vegetative state for over three years since suffering a brain embolism) and I wanted to particularly feature Dr Chan’s Tang Poetry translation of that famous William Massey quotation from his book The Origin and Progress of Letters, printed in 1763.

The quote is as follows: -
“Whence did the wondrous mystic art arise of painting Speech and speaking to the eyes, that we by tracing magic lines are taught how to embody and colour thought”

When I gave these words to Dr Chan back in the late 1980’s he took the words away for a few weeks, and then returned with the four characters that form his translation. I was more than a little surprised that it should be so brief and especially so because the first two characters were Shu Fa - these together mean ‘Calligraphy’. The third character is Yuan, which means Source or Origin, and the last character is Liu, which means Stream or Flow. At the time I was not familiar with the ancient form of Tang Poetry which traditionally consists of exactly four characters. Each character is chosen with great care to be a brilliantly faceted diamond with great depth of meaning. If you think about Dr Chan’s translation for a moment or two you will perhaps see that it is in fact a quite apt and very scholarly poetical translation.

The first character of Shu Fa - Shu is actually derived from the symbol for a hand holding a brush set on top of the symbol for the Sun, which may make you think about the connection between that and the words from our bible ‘in the beginning was the word’ and the story of the light being brought into the world ‘And Heaven was without form and void and darkness was upon the waters of the deep and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters and said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light’. The second part of ‘Calligraphy’ is the character for Fa, which is ‘The Way’ as in the Way of Zen. When this is added to the hand holding the brush set above the symbol for the Sun then the mind can begin to see the depth of meaning in this complete character. Add Yuan – Source or Origin; and Liu - Stream or Flow and an even deeper picture emerges.

I have known this translation for over twenty years and it is like second nature to me, but suddenly I saw it so much more clearly, and whilst creating the works to show and honour this translation I actually had the amazingly powerful thought that I am part of this flow!

When I came to do the Dragon which forms the central part of the trilogy of works I found it interesting that the mythical creature that I painted turned out to have a very friendly and benign looking demeanour! The style of characters used in this work is different from the two surrounding works and read from top to bottom, with the translation in English written in a fine italic down the sides.

When the first Speech of the Gods exhibition was shown in 2008 at the Redland Museum’s lovely light and airy arched-roof Gallery it included lots of different work, but it was the floating panels that attracted Hervey Bay Regional Gallery Director Marj Sullivan who said that she would like to host the exhibition some time in the future. I was happy to agree as I thought that the eight floating panels on Chinese Mulberry paper deserved a further audience and Marj agreed that I could produce a series of new wall works to go with the drops so that their exhibition would be quite different from the first one.
I decided to ‘launch’ a very large Chinese Brush for this exhibition so naturally quite a lot of the wall works feature brushwork which added to the decided Chinese influence.

Ruth with her large brush and the work 'Heaven and Earth'

Interestingly this large brush takes up so much ink that it requires a week of rinsing it in clear water to get it to return to an ink-free state. Each day I would rinse it until the water ran clear, then hang it up to dry, and in the morning the bottom half of the brush was soaked with ink once again, but each day the ink would be a little less, slowly moving down towards the tip until it eventually remained clear.

I had not used this very large brush before 2010 as it had always seemed to be so very powerful and perhaps even intimidating but preparing for this exhibition seemed to be the ideal time to christen it, and I have to confess that I was a little cross with myself for having left it for so long. There is something that is very alive and invigorating about using the brush, and the larger the brush, then the more invigorating! I have no doubt whatsoever that I will continue to use this beautiful brush.

The work ‘Heaven and Earth’ was done in 2010 and was one of the three framed works that I put in the exhibition, three others were slipped into Gallery frames, and the rest were hung frameless - just as the paper work itself using an ingenious method of suspension that is very unobtrusive and allows the works to just be themselves – perhaps an analogy would be a person sans clothing.

The system comprises a clear plastic sleeve that slips on to the top of the work and the top of the sleeve has a small channel into which two small tabs with a hole can be inserted. Through this hole a translucent push pin can be used. I was very happy with this form of presentation and feel that the works sit well on their own.

Showing the clear Perspex sleeve hanging system

‘Beatus-Speech of the Gods’, taken on the day of the opening of the exhibition, shows the system quite clearly and also demonstrates how unobtrusive these clear plastic sleeves are.>

I can certainly recommend them for anyone else who like me is unable to afford to pay for large frames when they wish to display large works. It is good that a gallery as prestigious as the Hervey Bay Regional Gallery offers artists an option like this.

I was truly delighted with the way in which the Director Marj Sullivan, the staff and volunteers of the Gallery hung the floating panels in the main space with nothing around them – they did look beautiful and they also moved slightly with the air conditioning which added a certain ethereal quality and spirit. Interestingly when one panel decided to move there would be no apparent reason for it, and it was always a different panel that took its turn to sway and float gracefully.

I had made about 24 new large works for this Exhibition though I did include just a few smaller pieces from the earlier Speech of the Gods as I felt that they needed to be shown.

Mira No 11 - The Lords Prayer

Not being content to display only large works I did have some smaller works, which included Mira No 11 ‘The Lords Prayer’ which was done especially for this occasion. You will see that it is shown together with two of my fingertips, which help to give an idea of the scale of the work. The top section is the Lords Prayer in Latin; the middle, with lettering only 1mm high, is the Lords Prayer in English and the bottom is a quote from one of the songs of Leonard Cohen poet/singer.

This piece sat nicely with Mira No. 5 – ‘The Codex Naturae’ and Mira No 7 – ‘Spiritus Aeternus’ as a splendid contrast to the larger works. I had hoped to get a couple of other new miniatures with gilding completed as well but unfortunately I ran out of time! I started work on my ‘Miras’ in the early 2000’s and have now done 11 in the series – they are all based on individual folios from the Mira Calligraphae Monumenta a fifteenth Century MS held in the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. For each work I take the basic layout of the page and the style and number of lines of the lettering but I use my own choice of words and illustrations that go with those words so that each piece is similar in some ways to the original but also completely different.

One of the other lovely things that the gallery did for me was to produce a printed decal of the Title of the Exhibition ‘Speech of the Gods’ which was given its own dedicated space on the back wall of the gallery. I had hoped that I may be able to save this signage at the end of the exhibition, but alas it was not to be even though I did try quite hard and purchased a sheet of polythene on which to affix it. However when we had removed one letter and I tried to put it onto the sheet, as the letter got close to the polythene, a sort of static attraction arose and the letter jumped down onto the sheet in a very untidy twisted manner. When I tried to lift it off to straighten the letter it just stretched and tore so I decided to give in to the fact that it would just have to be taken down and got rid of. I did however manage to get two very interesting photos of the process of removing the signage and the abstract of the removed lettering just before it was to be binned.

As part of the Exhibition there were two children’s workshops that were held on the Saturday after the opening, which consisted of me firstly taking the students through the exhibition and talking to them about the work before we went on to the workshop area. There they had a go with Chinese brushes and ink first of all and later some western calligraphy using a very basic sponge and bulldog clip pen. The morning session was for the 5 – 9 year olds and they were so keen on it that they went about twenty minutes over time!

The end of the logo decal

The afternoon session of 9 – 15 year olds was a complete surprise to me as it turned out that 13 of the 15 students were boys! And interestingly enough when one of them was a bit obstreperous it was the other boys that kept him in line! They were so fascinated by the marks made by the Chinese brush and ink that we didn’t get around to using the bulldog clip pens at all. I hope that some of their interest will continue. One of the best results so far of this exhibition was that I was contacted by the ABC local stories representative for the Hervey Bay area and asked if they could use the Set from my Flickr photo-share site on their web page. Of course I said YES, and you can see it if you click onto the following link: -

When Rick Thomason, the curator from the Redland Museum Gallery, saw the webpage he contacted me to say that he was very interested in having this new version of Speech of the Gods at the Museum again together with the new wall works. So I have had a meeting with him and we have agreed that this exhibition will take place in March 2012 and that the gallery will be completely cleared of all display cabinets so that the floating panels can hang in the same sort of marvellous empty space that Hervey Bay gave to them.

As this will really be Speech of the Gods Mark III, I will naturally do some new works for it and I am quite excited to think that this will add yet another dimension to this exhibition that is so very important to me. Who knows what I will come up with next! So the Circle continues.