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The seal script of this character depicts two hands in agreement. The standard character seems to have the hands crossed or clasped. Friendship in this ideogram is indicated by the warmth of colors and the group of triangles.

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Associated with grass, weeds, straw, and herbs, such plants include psychedelics or entheogens. Informally, Cannabis, for example, is called weed or grass. Thus, the painting is appropriately entitled Entheogen. The yellow at top may be viewed as a flower or a metaphor.

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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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Kindred Spirits is a more modern abstract pattern from the original character, which is associated with similarity, likeness, resemblance, and equivalence. Pictorially, when reduced to basic geometrics, the three intersected linear elements do seem related.

Screen image does injustice to the actual central background hue, which varies in ambient light: in bright shade it has only a tint of pale green, but in reduced light the green is more obvious, darker, and muted like adjacent hues for an even tone. The computer processed imaged seems more 'parchment' in hue.

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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.

 

Debra Jan Bibel

MORPHOLOGIES:
An Exploration, An Evolution

Fresh Paint

This page features the latest visual compositions, completed in 2026 and a selection from 2025. Because the page will change with each new opus, monitor the page periodically. The images may also be found among the galleries.

NOTE: All reduced and overly processed images fail utterly in even hinting at the quality and the true colors of the actual paintings and their effect on the viewer.

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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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The viewer of this painting may enjoy the eye play of circles and be philosophically aware of the emotional responses to the appearance of changing patterns. The scientist, however, will appreciate that Lizard is the idealized depiction of the skin of these creatures, based on the desert green lizard and the tropical chameleon.

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The year 2025 begins with the first part of a diptych: Islamic Circle. The circle is key symbol in Islam. The circle is found with domes, in tile arabesques, and other wall ornamentation. It represents unity, wholeness or totality, cycles of seasons and generations, and the eternal without beginning or end.  Blue Mosque is on the right side. To emphasize the circular elements of the architecture and design depicted in this work of the Blue Mosque [Sultan Ahmed Mosque] in Istanbul, the composition eliminated the vast filigree, rounded the corners of the wide 8-sided polygon symbols, Rub-el-Hizb, into circles and ovoids, and reduced the detailing, as the stained glass windows and calligraphy. Moreover, the magenta and red oxides of the mosque were changed to greens and browns. Green is associated with Muhammed, as it was his favorite color, and green means life in the desert. The mosque was completed in 1610. On the left: Circles and scalloped arcs are found throughout the mosque in Cordoba, Spain, first constructed in 788 and then expanded in stages This painting Al-Andalus is of the maqsurah section and qibla wall with mihrab entrance at lower righ and skylight above, built by al-Hakam II in 966. Interestingly, Roman corinthion columns are included as decorative wall reliefs, probably via the; craftsmen sent by Emperor Nicephoros II of Byzantium.

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Seemingly abstract, this painting is fully representational. Symbolic of trees, the green circles are arrayed as contour lines as on a topographic map. Moreover, circles on the higher elevations are increasingly larger, as trees would be so when viewed from above. Hence, the painting has a quasi three-dimensional perspective. Indeed, it is a precise map of an area in Northern California, in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. It consists of some 5,560 circles. Its title is Ironside Mountain Lookout.

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The circular/spherical boulders in this painting, Talus, represent ideals; however, actual gravel, loose scree, fixed talus and also boulders, from mountain erosion and falls or volcanic ejection, can be semi-polished by abrasion of moving water (liquid or frozen) and even by wind and waves. Such rounded rocks are found behind receding glaciers and especially dried river beds [wadis]. Boulder or talus fields are also found on Mars.

(left) Form
(right) Emptiness

Not proper Chinese but separately ideograms mean community action / give, pay, or compensate / wing / islands, shoals, or continents, or more poetically
We all fly to the islands.

Links to enlargements:     we    give   wing    islands  

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