Colophon

A colophon, on a Chinese hand scroll, is what a later reader adds in the margin after looking a long time: not a caption, a response. This one is about the page rather than the painting, but the manners are the same — say what you noticed, and stop.

This site keeps one rule: whatever can be left out, leave out. Type is the system serif, because choosing a font was not this practice's business. Colour is black ink on a paper ground, with one red kept back for the mark at the foot of each page — the way a seal is the one note of colour a scroll is allowed. There is nothing running behind any of this: partly because the brief asked for plain HTML and CSS, and partly because a page that computes can't sit as still as these paintings do, and stillness was the only thing worth testing for here.

The handful of lines above each heading are the whole of the illustration this site permits itself — a bank, a few bare trees, and a stretch of nothing standing in for water. It is not a picture of a painting. It is the same three moves the paintings make, drawn once and repeated on every page, the way he painted the same bank for twenty years — in markup instead of ink.