Stephanie Pui-Mun Law - Dreamscapes Magical Menagerie: Creating Fantasy Creatures and Animals with Watercolor

When I was studying at Berkeley, I came across a story about a man who had the (mis)fortune to be loved by two women, both of whom came into his life under mysterious circumstances. One of the women was eventually revealed to be a ghost, and the other a fox spirit. The story lingered in my mind. I found I could not stop thinking about it, just as the man in the tale could not stop obsessing over the two trickster creatures who had possessed his mind and life.

Years later I attempted to hunt the story down with the scant information I had. Used bookstores abound in Berkeleyyou could visit a different one each day of the week. I loved to spend long hours browsing the aisles filled with relics and treasures of paper and ink. For years I haunted the folklore shelves, until finally one day I came across a book entitled Chinese Ghost and Love Stories. It had a horrid yellow cover, and the binding was coming apart. In a roundabout route of translations, it had arrived in the English volume I held in my hands via German from the original Chinese. But it contained the story I was searching for, as well as many other Chinese fairy tales about ghosts and fox spirits.

The morality of the supernatural creatures in these tales is not quite in step with that of humans. They are drawn to and fascinated by humans. The ghosts long for an essence they no longer possess, and the fox spirits never possessed it to begin with. Like moths to a flame, they hover around the bright flare of humanity, sometimes wreaking havoc with the strength of their yearning. And yet they are an integral part of the world and the natural order of the universe they exist in. There is an intimacy and a naturalness to their storiesthey slip into the lives of the protagonists the same way they slipped into my art.

One can draw and paint animals for mere love of nature and wildlife. There is undoubtedly that aspect to my pursuit of the natural world in artwork. But there is a mythic tie that myriad creatures in uncounted cultures have had to humans and to gods. They are a reflection through which we can see ourselves, with our most noble qualities as well as our most base, simplified and distilled into the traits and characteristics of the natural world that we are surrounded by. And so, as our stories through time are filled with rich metaphors and fantastical creatures, there is a wealth of inspiration to draw from in artwork.