I began to move away from painting the Wisdom Kings as my art turned darker depicting students fighting violently. I struggled to further explore what I was teaching, the validity of which greatly impacted the future direction of my work. The question grew in my mind, why are we motivating children to fight with hollow rewards? Am I teaching the right answers without understanding the problem?. If every art has a medium through which its purpose is defined, then what is the medium of martial arts?
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This period was a free form of painting in acrylic on canvas and ink on newsprint indicative of early American abstraction through which the violent energy of the paintings manifested the figures in it. This period revealed the possibility that fighting wasn’t a skill or behaviour but a medium from which they are created, and that the study of martial arts was an art, a theme, a radical alternative to understanding fighting in a way our eyes can’t see, as though we are all born with the same learning obstacle. I saw martial arts like the black crayon that helps people understand something that at first appears distorted, a way of providing texture to the contours of a large feature of human nature we otherwise outlaw and yet celebrate almost everywhere.
