Louis Armstrong is always said to have been concerned about the state of his chops. I sign my drawings and painting using a chop; a seal using red ink given to me by a kind translator ms Shanna Lin on a trip to Taiwan in 1998 to row in a university regatta. Each of the crew recieved a personal chop. I have been using mine ever since – it features on the top right of the website. It is a rebus or visual pun on my name combining the kanji for gold and the kanji for ding – the hammer of a gong. I like the wit in it and feel it finishes a drawing more neatly than a mere scrawl across the page.
