Hanson Ling
Spiritual rituals in tempera paint and India ink
Hanson Ling is a reluctant celebrity, a Chinese-Texan, a postal worker by day, artist by night, who currently is working on illustrating the entire bible in pencil.
“If I don’t achieve something, I get really, really bored,” Ling says.
Ling was raised in a Christian household in Hong Kong. The family moved to Texas in 1965. While a student at an Episcopal high school, Ling was uncertain about his future. One day he visited a friend’s house, where one of the friend’s relatives — a “sleight-of-hand artist and a mind reader” — told him he had a future in art.
“If I don’t achieve something, I get really, really bored”
Ling’s mother told him that Chinese people believe in fortune telling as a philosophy, not a superstition. So, he enrolled as an art student at the University of Texas in Austin.
“I’m not like Picasso, going door to door to sell [my] artwork,” Ling says. “I feel like the Lord wants me to do it.”
Ling’s “Revelation Series” was inspired by Handel’s “Messiah,” the Sistine Chapel frescoes, and William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job. The tempera resist technique used to create the illustrations is “a methodology that reaches the level of spiritual ritual,” says Ken Bloom, executive director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.
First, Ling sketches the image in pencil on white paper, then he paints over the sketch with white tempera paint. Once the tempera dries, he pours India Ink over it and lets that dry as well. The piece goes through a series of washes where it is plunged into tubs of clean water up to four times. The white paint washes away or is brushed off.
Ling’s “Revelation Series” was inspired by Handel’s “Messiah,” the Sistine Chapel frescoes, and William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job.
“You have to brush very carefully,” Ling says. “You have to always watch to see. It’s 80 percent predictable and 20 percent surprises.”
“It’s kind of like driving a car backwards. Anybody can do it. But it’s hard.”
Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, says:
Hanson Ling walks a narrow plank in these illustrations … He trips me up with his humor and casualness. He snares me in living figures that have real presence. He charms me with his cultured naiveté.
Bloom was surprised to find an item from his own office in one of Ling’s recent illustrations — the rope handle on his father’s attaché case.
Ling isn’t interested in selling individual pieces of his artwork, but he hopes to leave a legacy.
He says the Revelation Series “is dedicated to those who hold a concern about mankind and who try to make this world a better place in which to live.”
Originally published by The Colorado Daily