The Sound of Temple Bells, Yang Panel - Original Gouache

The bell cannot be painted. In the Chinese painting tradition, to name a work after a sound is to reach deliberately beyond what the brush can touch, to acknowledge that some things exist only at the edge of what art can hold.

The Sound of Temple Bells does not depict a bell. It depicts what surrounds the moment of sound: climbing roses ascending a sky blue ground, butterflies suspended mid-drift, the traceable movement of living things against stillness. These are the sounds the brush can follow. The bell is the sound it cannot.

Sound moves differently depending on what carries it. A butterfly crossing light can be traced, wing by wing, petal by petal. A bell dissolving into air cannot. Woodard paints both kinds of movement into a single vision: two long, lean panels, one yin and one yang, conceived as one painting and experienced as one continuous surface.

The threshold between the seeable and the felt. That is where The Sound of Temple Bells lives.