From Nothingness to Emptiness
My mind produces more thoughts than I can keep track of. Many seem very important at the time. After all, they are mine. Yet if I look back before falling asleep, only a few have stayed with me, and fewer still seem to have mattered.
When I sit down to meditate, I sometimes begin by wanting to clear my head. On other days the thoughts leap about like a troop of monkeys. Trying to chase them away only gives them another task. When I stop following each one, some lose their shape and pass. Others return. The image that comes to mind is a cloud drifting by, or the fading cry of a wild goose.
That experience is one starting point for these paintings. It is not a definition of Buddhist emptiness. Śūnyatā, particularly in Madhyamaka philosophy, concerns the absence of an independent, intrinsic nature; it does not simply mean that nothing exists or that the mind contains no thoughts.[1]
New Works on Meditation
I mainly work in series. Eventually I reach a point where I can no longer see much progress, and something has to change. In early summer 2023, the paintings had become overloaded. I returned to reduction and meditation, with Zen and Dao more explicitly in view.
After the summer break, I began feeling my way back towards that openness. A blank sheet makes it look easy. Then the first marks arrive, followed by more, and suddenly the familiar carousel is turning again. The Ride belongs to that unsettled beginning: plenty of activity, without an obvious destination.
At the same time, I wanted to continue the earlier series and see whether something from the reduction phase could enter it. Fewer marks are one possibility; a different relationship between the marks may be another.
Evening Meditation at the Water
Viewers often mention the light in my work. Here I wanted to try another way of bringing it into the picture, allowing the surface to hover between something observed and something imagined. The bright opening on the right meets a dense, speckled ground; the darker strokes keep it from becoming a simple view of calm water.
Serenade at the Water
A similar starting point took this sheet further towards my Abstract Surrealism series. The pale turquoise space and suspended forms remind me of the fragments of a dream that remain after waking. Some disappear at once; others accompany us well into the day.
Death in the Park
The starting point for this picture was news I heard during the last days of my spa stay: a woman and a man had died, one in a room and the other in the park. The news entered the work as a disturbance within a meditative setting.
I have tried before to approach death through abstraction. It is difficult to do without falling into platitudes. Here the pale glow sits among dark, broken forms and small red accents. I wanted the unease and the quieter passages to remain together.
At the time of writing, I was still considering small corrections to some of these sheets. The question was whether another mark would clarify something, or merely start the carousel again.
Footnotes
[1] On śūnyatā and intrinsic nature, see Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna, section 2, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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