75”x 45”, oil on canvas

Private Collection

The soul is a place in the body.

But the now the net has been cast over you.

You are a soul permanently detached from its body

Or a body permanently detached from its soul.

I see your bright coat vanishing in the endless blur.

But every shade of friendship persists,

In the mountains, in the grass,

In that vast Gobi desert that blots out the frontier.

Friendship was the subject of so many poems and works of calligraphy. Giving poems and calligraphy to friends was a way of binding individuals together as they were scattered to posts across the vast empire that was China. Sometimes I have the sense that friendship extends even beyond death. While it’s difficult to make out in a photograph, the text is legible throughout. It fades into a fog of dusty white. The wine-coloured letters are intended to look as though they’re picked out at random. But they could spell out ”GORDON.” As I painted, I thought of my friend and fellow artist, Gordon Lebredt, who had died of cancer a few years before.