Eagle on a pine tree

Qi's inscription seems to question the bitter civil strife and foreign aggression in China in the thirties:

Why attack ordinary birds,
Spraying blood and feathers on the ground?

Borrowing lines from Du Fu.
[Trans. Ellsworth et al, Later Chinese Painting]

The great eagle is inspired by the 17th century individualist Badashanren. Qi relies less on individually inflected brush line than his model and more on strong design. Qi's genius in the use of positive and negative space and the meeting and parting of forms is evident both in the painting and in the beautifully carved seal that follows his inscription. Qi used a distinctive straight cutting style in his seal carving, seldom turning the knife. the resulting strong, rough line shares the aesthetic of calligraphic scripts carved in stone and clay. In this painting, the hand of the artist is as sure in creating the angularity and bold force of the pine branches as in the supple, evenly modulated strokes of the needles.