A Painting for a Chapel
2020
Oil on Board
5ft x 4ft
ENQUIRE
When the world was forced to stand still through covid lock down , and people were made to stay at home many of us got the chance step off the treadmill and to reevaluate our lives. The busy chattering’s of our wired in wired out brains as we race about day-to-day life in the hustle of trying to survive , in part explained why many of my own drawings and paintings were hustling with equally busy chattering’s. It took covid lock down to silence those chattering’s in me and to give into the calm expansive spaces that both Rothko and the Bigton sunsets I had painted years earlier invoked.
In artistic terms the east is less afraid of the void than the west in terms of conceptions of space and time in that the ‘emptiness’ of the blank spaces of the paper are embraced as an integral part of the image. In the West, feeling empty is viewed as a negative condition. associated with terms like depression, or nihilism, and we attempt fill the void in our lives in any way we can. In Asia though, emptiness and the void are embraced . In Eastern religions emptiness is associated with meditation instead of negativity. The Chinese word for emptiness is kōng which translates as the void, the space between breaths, between lines, and between lives.
The expansive space used in traditional Chinese and Japanese painting gave the freedom to leave large areas of the page with ‘nothingness’. Empty space is not feared because it is an integral part of the language born of a culture that is not afraid of the void. Many of us in the West try to avoid empty space because we abhor a vacuum. We fill the empty space in our lives any which way we can , we avoid it and even medicate against it ,but before anything can exists there is empty space. Empty space acts as an incubator where imagination can come in and creativity can be born. Empty space can be a beginning, a possibility, a potential ,a capacity for birth.
We have to intentionally make space in our lives to create and learn to see this as an important activity . Jesus went to the hill to pray, creating a space free of distraction and busyness where God could show up. By creating a space, he could once again be filled.
Rembrandt did something similar with the large areas of mysterious darkness that fill some of his works . These paintings offer us the choice of either trying to fill the void with our own imaginations or accepting the void for what it is. In the west we are for the most part terrified of the void in all its manifestations and fill in our lives and by extension our art in any ways we can.
A high point of painting I came across around the time of covid is some of the abstract Tantric Art from Rajasthan that was made in by unknown artists on scraps of paper for personal meditation. These paintings are about as pure as painting can ever be, often painted on old envelopes , stripped of all ego and thus free of all commercial motivations these works of paired back glowing fields of colour were painted to invoke and capture profound spiritual states.
Being forced to stay still through Covid lockdown melted my resistance to using expansive space in my painting and helped me to accept some of the mystery of the void. I painted very large glowing sunsets, as luminous I could make them with layer upon layer cadmium reds oranges and vermilions that I occasionally quietened with cobalt blue. Expansive fields of colour flowed into my sunset inspired paintings as the world started to enter a period of respite and reset. What was once important was no longer important.
In artistic terms the east is less afraid of the void than the west in terms of conceptions of space and time in that the ‘emptiness’ of the blank spaces of the paper are embraced as an integral part of the image. In the West, feeling empty is viewed as a negative condition. associated with terms like depression, or nihilism, and we attempt fill the void in our lives in any way we can. In Asia though, emptiness and the void are embraced . In Eastern religions emptiness is associated with meditation instead of negativity. The Chinese word for emptiness is kōng which translates as the void, the space between breaths, between lines, and between lives.
The expansive space used in traditional Chinese and Japanese painting gave the freedom to leave large areas of the page with ‘nothingness’. Empty space is not feared because it is an integral part of the language born of a culture that is not afraid of the void. Many of us in the West try to avoid empty space because we abhor a vacuum. We fill the empty space in our lives any which way we can , we avoid it and even medicate against it ,but before anything can exists there is empty space. Empty space acts as an incubator where imagination can come in and creativity can be born. Empty space can be a beginning, a possibility, a potential ,a capacity for birth.
We have to intentionally make space in our lives to create and learn to see this as an important activity . Jesus went to the hill to pray, creating a space free of distraction and busyness where God could show up. By creating a space, he could once again be filled.
Rembrandt did something similar with the large areas of mysterious darkness that fill some of his works . These paintings offer us the choice of either trying to fill the void with our own imaginations or accepting the void for what it is. In the west we are for the most part terrified of the void in all its manifestations and fill in our lives and by extension our art in any ways we can.
A high point of painting I came across around the time of covid is some of the abstract Tantric Art from Rajasthan that was made in by unknown artists on scraps of paper for personal meditation. These paintings are about as pure as painting can ever be, often painted on old envelopes , stripped of all ego and thus free of all commercial motivations these works of paired back glowing fields of colour were painted to invoke and capture profound spiritual states.
Being forced to stay still through Covid lockdown melted my resistance to using expansive space in my painting and helped me to accept some of the mystery of the void. I painted very large glowing sunsets, as luminous I could make them with layer upon layer cadmium reds oranges and vermilions that I occasionally quietened with cobalt blue. Expansive fields of colour flowed into my sunset inspired paintings as the world started to enter a period of respite and reset. What was once important was no longer important.