Qian Li Holmes

Q Li Holmes was born into an artistic family in China where her parents and grandfather excelled at calligraphy. After studying traditional Chinese painting in China and Japan , Q moved to a small hill town in western Massachusetts with her husband and daughter, and has been teaching and exhibiting paintings for the last ten years. She has also done many art demonstrations, notably at the Smith College and the Norman Rockwell Art Museums .

Q also has master degrees in journalism and sociology from both the China Academy of Social Sciences and Syracuse University , and was for a time a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley.

Q's paintings are on display at the Sharon Fine Arts Gallery in Peterborough, New Hampshire; Canyon Ranch in Lenox; Arts Unlimited in South Hadley; Eastmount Fine Arts in Easthampton; and Shelburne Fine Arts in Shelburne Falls, MA.

Artist Statement

My painting style has evolved from my Chinese origins and my life in Western Massachusetts . I inherited the ancient path of Chinese art traditions which reach back in time to vistas of misty mountains and glimpses of rain-soaked lotuses, sentient stones and pensive bamboo, but my life in New England has also given me a second nature of maple-lined roads, lichen decorated stone walls and open fields with an occasional weathered barn.

My painting media are mineral color and rice paper, and I use Oriental brushes. A painting may take from three days to three years to complete.

About Oriental Art

Oriental brush painting can be traced as far back as 3,000 years ago in China. About the time that Buddhism was beginning to reach China along the Silk Road, around the first century A.D., brush painting and calligraphy started to emerge as the medium of a distinctive meditative art among China's scholars and Buddhist practitioners.

The media of this art form are very simple. The brush is made of natural hair -- goat, fox, horse or sable -- to create a soft pointed tip; the paper is made of a kind of grass and can be very absorbent; and the ink is from charcoal soot. The red seal that appears in almost all Oriental paintings may be either the artist's name or a favorite motif.

Given the absorbency of the paper and the softness of the brush, this art features a strong quality of sponaneity. To master it requires years of solitary practice, instilling artistic qualities of self-discipline, calm and inner strength.

In an old Chinese tale, an artist, when asked to paint a particular kind of fish, told the supplicant to come back in two years. When the person returned, the artist painted a wonderful fish on the spot in fifteen minutes.When asked about the two-year wait, the artist silently opened a closet from which there flew out hundreds of paintings of fish he had executed over two years.