The Beginning and the End
A Short Preliminary Remark
Before starting, I can almost hear someone objecting: “That is not scientific!” Fair enough. My metaverse is a painter’s thought experiment. Buddhist and Daoist ideas help shape my understanding of being, but I am not offering them as conclusions proved by quantum physics.
We live with models and assumptions. A hundred-dollar banknote, for example, is worth far more to us than the material from which it is made. That comparison interests me because it shows how strongly our world is shaped by meanings we share. It is an analogy, not a reason to treat scientific evidence as merely another agreement.
My Model
The questions that draw me to cosmology are often the ones I cannot picture: what might “before the beginning” mean? What do we imagine when we speak of an end? The Big Bang model describes an expanding universe, not an explosion from a central point into surrounding empty space.[1] My paintings take those questions elsewhere, into an imagined space where I can give them a visible form.
I begin with chaos and move towards a provisional boundary. Words such as “epicentre” and “edge” belong to the geography of my painted world. They are not locations I am claiming for the physical universe.
Myths about the Origin of the World
For the first painting I chose the dragon as an image of creation and chaos. Mythological creatures offer a way to approach forces that are difficult to represent. I am borrowing that possibility rather than claiming that creation myths share one account of how the universe began.
Perhaps you can see the chaos but not the dragon. With a little imagination, its head appears near the upper left, with an elongated body and wing-like forms below. I am increasingly interested in the feeling or principle of a subject rather than its recognizable outline. Here, creator and chaos are still almost one.
Painting #2: A Couple of Miles before the End of Time
The second work approaches the opposite end of the spectrum, spatially and philosophically. I called it A Couple of Miles before the End of Time. For now, that is as far as I can go.
I like the questions in that title. Does my imagined world end when time ends? Is there something beyond what a chronometer measures? Could there be time without matter? I let these remain questions rather than pretending that a painting can settle them.
At first I considered a more diffuse image, something like a blurred galaxy. Instead, I chose a few separated forms. Most of the sheet remains unpainted. There is little concrete to hold on to, yet the forms pull towards one another and also suggest distance. I read that tension through yin and yang.
This is where physics and philosophy meet for me as sources of questions. The painting does not demonstrate a theory. Its empty areas make the question more immediate.
Painting #3: The First Signs of Order
The third painting remains near my imagined beginning, but chaos is starting to organize itself. Light and dark separate; forms acquire boundaries; a view into the distance becomes possible. Rounded, almost spherical shapes begin to appear.
Oskar Kokoschka was an important early influence on me. Later, Chinese painting brought the question of omission into even sharper focus.[2] How much can I leave out? How little can remain while a painting still has something to say?
These two earlier works approach that question differently. The second is a conversation in two broad strokes. Try telling a story with so little.
For me, the question is whether something still happens between the marks. Is there a story, a tension, a relationship? Until I can go further, I will leave those last miles before the end of time as a meeting place for painting, physics and philosophy.
Footnotes
[1] For the distinction between an explosion in space and the expansion of space itself, see NASA’s Big Bang questions and answers. ↩
[2] I discuss omission, unpainted space and related ideas in Asian Art Theories, especially Emptiness and the Meaning of White. ↩
Related articles
Metaverse Project (II) · Metaverse (IV): Day and Night · Emptiness and the Meaning of White
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