Chinese Brush Painting: Bees and Wasps

Debra Di Blasi's visual and multimedia art has been exhibited at museums, galleries, and universities, with illustrations and fine art published in books and journals. This is the fifth book in a series showcasing her nature watercolors with sumi ink. Debra began Chinese brush painting and ink drawing while living in Hong Kong and continues to practice Eastern painting and drawing methodologies as they intersect with Western art styles. Chinese influences include Zhao Shao'ang, Yang Shanshen, and other Asian artists whose work combines the immediacy of abstraction with representation. She uses a variety of brushes and papers, with a special fondness for raw mulberry paper, yuanshu bamboo fibers rice paper, and xuan rice paper of various weights and absorbencies.

As an art critic and contributing writer, Debra published articles and interviews for The Pitch, SOMA San Francisco arts magazine, and The New Art Examiner. She holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, where she later taught literature and creative writing with emphasis on innovative and experimental forms.

She is a former book publisher and currently an award-winning author of 13 books, including Birth of Eros, The Jiri Chronicles, and Drought & Say What You Like which won the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. The short film based on Drought, directed by Lisa Moncure and cowritten by Moncure and Di Blasi, won a host of national and international awards, including Best Screenplay from Kansas City Film Jubilee, and was one of only six US films invited to the Universe Elle section of the 2000 Cannes International Film Festival.

Among her other awards are the 2019 C&R Press Nonfiction Award for her lyric memoir, Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past; a James C. McCormick Fiction Fellowship from Christopher Isherwood Foundation; Diagram Innovative Fiction Award; &NOW Award; and Kansas City Metropolitan Arts Council Inspiration Grant. Her writing is published in prominent literary journals and notable anthologies of innovative writing.