The Mountain Hermit

Acrylic Ink on Paper

• The mountain hermit has appeared across centuries of Zen and Taoist writing — a figure who has withdrawn not from life but toward it, into silence, and the slow company of stone and cloud.

• In classical Chinese painting, the mountain hermit — 山人, the 'mountain person' — was less a figure of isolation than of alignment: someone who had found the pace of stone and water. The altitude was incidental. The stillness was the point.

• Original, if still available, can be ordered here.