Terra Cotta Soldier, 30" x 22", pastel on newsprint paper, 1986. Artist's collection.

This pastel drawing is executed on a Chinese language newspaper. The face in the drawing is taken from a photograph of one of the multitudes of terra cotta figures excavated in the 1980s in the Xian province of China. These life-size terra cotta figures were essentially an army of soldiers modeled in uniform, placed in formation along with life-size terra cotta horses and weaponry and buried as part of a distinguished ancient Chinese emperor's entombment to accompany him in the after world.

At this time I was very fond of using Chinese language newspaper as a visual point of departure upon which I would develop my own compositions. I thought, perhaps in a provincial way, that these pages of Chinese characters (letters) and illustrations were visually beautiful and mysterious, and suggested a protoplasmic universe of visual and aesthetic information. During this period I made everything from figure drawings to abstract expressionist compositions on Chinese newspaper.