6, from Cold Mountain Series, Zen Studies

"Cold Mountain was one of the great poets of the Tang dynasty whose output amounted to about three hundred poems. They can be playful, touching or bitter or a combination of all three. They frequently describe the landscape of the mountains where Cold Mountain sought refuge from the Imperial court, with his burbling streams, lush vegetation, carpets of wild flowers, roaring waterfalls, echoing gorges and signing birds; a landscape of solitude in nature. While retaining occasional hankerings for the worldly life he had left behind, Cold Mountain wrote about his lifelong pursuit of the Tao, 'a state of intuitive understanding in which the unity of "I" and "other" is experienced as vividly as the heat of fire or the coldness of ice. Once this has taken place, [the Taoist] can thenceforward respond with total spontaneity to every situation, just as plants bend spontaneously towards sunlight.' In his desire to lose control in making art, to act simply as a receiver and transmitter of the energy of nature, Marden aspires to a Taoist attitude."

- Jeremy Lewison, Brice Marden Prints 1961-991, 1992, p. 52.