maiji: lotus

[image set: 1) Photo of open notebook next to two glass dip pens, one slightly sanded down with a blunt tip. The page shows a haiku written in ink of swirling blues, greens and yellow-brows, creating an underwater-seaweed-and-bubbles impression, with circles at the bottom of the image evoking the shapes of lotus roots. 2) Eight swatches laid out in neat rows next to a mini flashcard set being used as an ink colour swatchbook. 3) In-progress photo showing an open notebook at an early stage of the illustration, where it is just the lines of poetry bordered by green lines and drops of ink with shapes resembling leafy pads. A hand holding a waterbrush hovers over the page, and a glass pen, vials of ink, ink bottle, sketchbook and pen can be seen lying around. 4) An angled closeup of the illustration with fresh wet blobs of ink.] somewhere deep beneaththe white lotus flowers liethe roots of our soup - Poetry and art by Maiji/Mary Huang, humangray.com There are a lot of aspects to haiku, and of course people have different tastes. A good haiku can look deceptively simple, evoking really powerful stories by painting all the things around the story and letting the reader’s own mind fill the gap with emotive colour. This is something I aim (try, hope) to do in a lot of my creative work, text or image-based. With varying degrees of success.One of the main things I love is when a haiku can break down into three clear moments or segments but also work as one seamless sentence. I don’t often manage to do that, so I was happy with where I was able to net out.When finalizing "lotus", I spent an inordinate amount of time debating between the use of “of” versus ”for” in the last line, “the roots of / for our soup. “For” is interesting because it gives it a sense of direction and purpose - the roots exist in service of the soup, we are hunting for roots for our soup, the roots will be transformed into the soup.“Of” has a more neutral, floating taste to it - even a sense of interdependence. The roots exist; they are the basis and foundation of our soup. But soup is not the only purpose of their existence - or perhaps, it is not only the soup that owes its existence to the existence of the lotus flower roots. Or perhaps they are not separate things at all.In the end, I realized if I were writing it Chinese or Japanese, the meaning in my head would simply be “of”. So “of” it was.I usually only share one WIP photo, but here I loved the underwater bubbling-up look of the glistening ink drops at the angle!