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One
ideogram is associated with small bodies of water, such as a pond, a
pool, a moat, and a water tank. Another such place is the title of
the painting,
Reservoir.
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Lineage,
which resembles a collision of three plus-looking (+) characters
representing the number 10, hence 30, is associated with generation
(30 years),
era, and world, depending on context. [Chinese actually juxtaposes
the two characters for three and ten to mean 30.] Color patterns
indicate the changes occurring with each generation.
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Mountains are
the legendary abodes of deities, geniis/jinns, but also
sages who are often depicted in front of caves. The Chinese
character is simply "mountain man" and is associated with
the Eight Immortals of Chinese mythology. In American
culture during the expansion of the nation, mountain men
were independent trappers of the fur trade and territorial
explorers.
Mountain Hermit
is more mundane.
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Bold black on reds is the derived
character meaning no or not. On a recycled canvas,
No is painted
over a grid of circles, which in oblique light may be detected. The resulting
significance of this ideogram
on such a subtle,
largely hidden background is open to the viewer.
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*
Antiquity
is derived from the character meaning old, antique, and formerly. The bronze
color and earthy colors, with gemlike rectangles, suggest archeological
artifacts.
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Based on abbreviation of elements,
particularly in Japanese kanji, and symbolized further with circles is
Music: La Mer.
The character is associated with
music, pleasure, and happiness.
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*
Into the Light
can be viewed as a pathway with blocked distractions by those unfamiliar with
the Chinese character of light, bright, clear, evident. The two sides of the
ideogram are radicals for sun and moon.
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*
This somber ideogram
Gloom,
derived from the Chinese, is associated with sadness, grief, worry, and pity.
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Quartet of Ideograms:
After a creative hiatus of 6 months during which the new book Resonance was
published, comes a return to Chinese ideograms in a different stylistic
exploration. Chosen for their spatial arrangement of strokes and spaces, not for
meaning, four ideograms serendipitously could be arranged, with poetic license,
to an interesting sentence.
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*
The diptych
Form / Emptiness
are derived ideograms referring to the Buddhist Heart Sutra (the core of the
large philosophical Prajaparamita treatise), which states "form is emptiness,
emptiness is form." It points toward process metaphysics, behavioral attributes,
quantum fundamentals and observational dependency, concluding that existence is
not based on nouns or stuff but on gerunds, verbal actions that serve as nouns,
and are mutually dependent.
In English, the first character is translated to "form," but Chinese has several
characters that are synonyms pertaining to form. The sutra ideogram itself,
found in Korea and Japan as well, variously means, depending on context (usually
specified by a follow-up ideogram), appearance, or hue, or substance, or the
material world; however, artistically, aesthetically it is inferior to the one
substituted for this work, which means appearance, shape, and form by structure
or conceptual category. A third ideogram synonym might have worked in the sutra,
as it refers to domain, territory, boundary, or indeed the world itself,
everything in perceptive existence.
[The painting Form
is self-referential via brush strokes. The form of the Form ideogram has common
vertical brushing while the green background space is irregular, turbulent,
chaotic.]
The second stylized Chinese character in the sutra is typically translated as
emptiness or void or space or hole. These meanings imply duality in being absent
with respect to something. Another way to translate it, particularly for this
sutra (which presents paradox), is "no-thingness."
The background of this
painting Emptiness
suggests a rainbow or prismatic color spectrum. A rainbow from ancient times has
been a symbol of a non-thing thing. A rainbow is not a substance, but an
untouchable appearance dependent on the angle of observation [40-42°] with water
droplets serving as a prism that splits composite white light into the spread of
component hues. We nonetheless name that form and can describe it, hence
becoming perceptively real, but it does not exist alone.
In Daoism, Lao Tzu's treatise begins with "the Dao that can be named is not
Dao." In the Bible, the first act Adam assigned himself was to name the beasts
in the field and birds in the air, everything in the world, hence causing
separation and differentiation. In the quantum world, the packet of energy that
comes out of the void, or itself, can act as a particle that individually and
collectively behaves as a wave depending on observational/detectional design. In
the Hindu Upanishads, the expression is neti, neti, not this, not that. In the
common world, we concretize the metaphor.
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