Mountains in Flight

Desaix's preference for minimalist composition reflects many years of living in Japan, but earthy peasant scenes and colors have appeared in his painting since his third residency in Vietnam (1995 to 1997). Rich color evokes his innate optimism, passion for life, and vivid recollections of ancient and contemporary Asia. Mountains, rivers, the sun, the moon, and the sea are recurrent themes.

Attuned to the harmony and balance of life, Desaix paints with an energetic palette of color, using acrylics on canvas, embedding gold leaf and handmade Asian papers into collages, mingling hints of nature or philosophical ideas in golds, reds, and mustards and creating evocative and sensuous mosaics of pleasure, innuendo, and adventure.

In 1962 Desaix shared a cottage in Berkeley with poet Jim Thurber. Jim Thurber arrived in San Francisco in the early 1960s during the height of the San Francisco Renaissance, a spontaneous gathering of poets from all over America who were writing a new poetry; rebellious, wild, and original.

Jim believed that poetry is an expressed reflection of the realization of the ineffable. In his own practice of poetry, he believed that the shortest distance between two points is unavailable to the poet. The poet is just a passenger along for a ride in a vehicle that has no particular destination as it follows the unexpected twists and turns of words and language left to proceed by themselves.

Desaix and Jim, the artist and poet, didn't meet again for 50 years. On a visit to Oregon in 2009, Desaix contacted Jim and within days the notion of this book of Jim's poems inspired by Desaix's paintings began to take shape.