These paintings are derived from Chinese characters or ideograms/ideographs. The particular ideogram was selected not by meaning but by aesthetic pattern of line and spacings.

 

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.

 

Previous work involved Chinese characters. See: Calligraphy

Stylized calligraphy (2011-2012).
16 × 20 inches

Change, Painted  Version

Hua-Yen, Painted  Version

Unity: Not One, Not Two, Painted Version

Forest Dharma, Painted  Version

Season Cycle, Painted Version 

 Land Construction, Painted Version

Music, Painted Version

 

Debra Jan Bibel

MORPHOLOGIES:
An Exploration, An Evolution

Ideograms

A quaint textual device is starting a document with an enlarged capital letter to a word. In medieval times, monks would decorate the background of the Latin letters with paintings of floral elements or scenes of people at work or animals. At times, the letter itself becomes tranformed into a key part of the miniature. My latest series of caligraphic derivations of Chinese ideograms is much like this tradition. For the viewer unfamiliar with Chinese characters, the painting has a geometric abstract appearance of the hard-edge school of art. For those who know Chinese writing, the painting has an amusing quality of recognition and association. Circles take the place of printed or brushed flourishes, which themselves are often substitutes of radicals or complex arrays of brush strokes.

 

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.

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.

Forthcoming

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. The form is said to resemble a drum and bells on a wooden stand.

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 portions are themselves radicals for sun and moon.

This somber ideogram Gloom, derived from the Chinese, is associated with sadness, grief, worry, and pity.  

(left) Form
(right) Emptiness

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, 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.

*    *    *

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  

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.

All images are copyright by Debra Jan Bibel.  Permission for use in electronic media or for printed reproduction is required. 

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