Meditation Space

At the edge of nothingness and invisibility is the materiality of a painting.  A painting is a strange anachronistic object in the age of digital pictures. Like sacred reliquaries containing the bones of saints, paintings are reminders of what cannot be seen. Artists have long made collection boxes designed to capture the fleeting experience of an ephemeral day’s experience.  On a mountain in Nepal, I gathered green granite crystals, scraps of prayer flags, rusted pitons, and old coins.  Later these become a shrine to an ineffable experience of living in the clouds, which I named the Meditation Space.

 With artists Natalie Wood, Tara Carpenter,
Kristen Sumbot and Josh Graham.

 Landscape painting has a long tradition as a quest for adventure.  For example, the artist as explorer who suffers heroic exploits in the service of making a painting has precedents in the exploration of the American West. Aside from the interest in revealing the sensational, artists such as Frederick Church sought to reveal the forces of God and nature that regulate the universe. It is in this spirit of the quest that I made my journey, tormented like Ishmael “with an everlasting itch for things remote” and with the persistent doubts of postmodernism. After all, the ways that we define nature and our relationships with nature are filled with paradox. What nature is it that we want to return to? Which nature is the one that sustains us, and in turn, we need to preserve? Is it wilderness we want to preserve or a garden cultivated by human culture? Evidence of these conflicting themes is found throughout the history of art and in contemporary popular culture.

For example, the movie Avatar, depicts the clash of civilization with nature, and suggests that the there is an underlying mystical force in nature that must be recognized and honored.

 

 see Avatar Trailer