In Ancient Chinese lore, there is a god-king named Shennong. He is called the father of Chinese herbology. Descriptions of him say that he had leaves on his body, as he was part of nature so entwined as to be a spirit of the ephemera of the ground, the driving force it musters to create the food and tangled greenery adorning mother earth.

Shennong had a clear belly so he was able to see what his stomach made with the herbs he ate. This way he could know clearly their affects on the human body. He taught humans the use of the plow, aspects of basic agriculture, and the uses of medicinal plants. He is a great ancestor of the Chinese

The Shénnóng Běn Cǎo Jīng is a book on agriculture and medicinal plants, attributed to Shennong. Research suggests that it is a compilation of oral traditions, written between about 200 and 250 AD.
This artwork is painted in the style of an early Chinese watercolor to be in keeping with the times when the legends of Shennong began.

Shennong is the patron deity of farmers, rice traders, and practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine.


© Laura Santi

★ A WORD ABOUT GICLEE TECHNOLOGY: The giclee prints I sell of my originals look and feel like paintings and don't loose definition as they are enlarged to the sizes for each piece that I offer. Artwork is scanned via what looks like a really big "camera"/computer and then printed with a sophisticated inkjet printer, which is 5+ feet wide, onto artists' archival heavyweight watercolor paper. It takes about 15 minutes to print a 24"x36". This makes the most crisp accurate print available in fine art printing technology. People often mistake the prints for actual paintings.