Images of Change: Paintings on the I Ching

This very beautiful book of paintings is designed to serve as an inspirational companion to the study of the I Ching. In reading the I Ching or Book of Changes we encounter a mystery that can be directly known yet not explained. It is an oracle founded upon intuitive laws of chance and at the same time it is systematic and logical. It tells of the perpetual changes that animate all life. As a book, the I Ching represents the quintessence of Chinese wisdom. It was conceived over the centuries by some of China's most profound seers and thinkers, including Confucius. The I Ching forms an enigmatic yet practical system of images, judgments, and revelations that deals with the mechanics of time and space. But more than unraveling the threads of human fate, the I Ching dwells upon a vast order in the universe, and the sixty-four hexagrams that are the basis of the I Ching form constellations that describe our location between the courses of heaven and earth. In rare, inspired art Terry Miller has created graphic picture worlds for each of the sixty-four hexagrams. Where the book arbitrates or speaks, he has seen. It takes much time, traveling through the eye into these delicate and fascinating landscapes, to perceive the subtlety and distance of their impressions. Their goal is always to illuminate the symbols and phenomena of this world, not merely to record but to discover nature. Each of the paintings is based on the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. The editor, Hale Thatcher, has selected key phrases and fragments from this translation so as to outline some of the basic themes in each of the sixty-four hexagrams and to relate them to the appropriate paintings without distorting the meaning of the original text. Also, some additional words about the illustrations appear at the bottom of each page. The quotations reveal some of the symbolic and metaphysical depths fundamental to the paintings and also introduce the Book of Changes to those who do not yet know it. THE ARTIST Terry Miller was born on September 17, 1939, in Portland, Oregon. He studied art in Oakland. These sixty-five paintings were realized in the area of Caspar, Navarro, and Mendocino, California, from 1966 to 1970. His pictures were achieved with a fine one-hair brush and pen on rice paper, finished in lacquer, and then mounted in handmade frames. Miller was thirty-one years old when he completed them. As an artist, he was entirely unknown outside of friends and painters in this area. These paintings were the final expression of his life—a work from which he never returned. THE AUTHOR Hale Thatcher was born in January 1945, in Saint Louis, Missouri, of English and Cherokee background. He has traveled widely in Africa and the Middle East. He is a translations editor for the San Francisco poetry review Isthmus, and is the author of two books of poems, Moons and Water Rocks (1970) and Shadow Pools (1974), and has also written several plays.