Original painting

Harvest

收割

Not one stalk of rice is drawn. The whole field is assembled from thousands of small touches of gold, green and violet — the method Mi Fu devised in the eleventh century for ink, carried over into oil. The distance is held not by perspective lines but by the dots themselves cooling and thinning as they recede. Three figures bend at the near edge, each no more than a few strokes, and they set the scale for everything behind them.