Imagine, you are standing on the edge of a peninsula. Before you lies a vast panorama in which the sky meets water. At sunset, the body of water reflects the colors of the clouds. As the landscape turns to vivid shades of orange, yellow and blue, the all-encompassing beauty becomes impossible to fully perceive. Before your eyes can observe the entirety of the vista, the colors have changed and the shapes in the sky have transformed into a completely different scene. 

As your awareness of the natural world increases, the connections between all aspects of life become clearer. The elements that make up this landscape are found within all forms of life, as well as all the things that allow civilization to grow. Visually, patterns of shapes found in the sky and the ripples of the water seem very similar to those found on tree bark and rock formations. The colors of a sunset become reminiscent of the changing leaves in autumn. 

As I am a Buddhist by birth, that helps me grow under Buddha’s principles. My experience as an artist, more or less, parallels my involvement with Buddhism– 8 years of practice and study. Reinforced by my experiences of practicing meditation, by readings of various Buddhist scholars and practitioners, and by the work and example of John Ruskin, Michel de Montaigne, John Cage, John Dewey, Joseph Beuys, and others, I’ve maintained a belief in art as both a way of doing and a way of being. These constitute three strands of my working practice as an artist and merge into my activities as an enquirer and teacher.

 The world is a hubbub of languages, songs and stories, dances and images woven into the air and waters, inscribed on the land, reaching into the past and the future – including the symbol structures and communication systems not only of humans but of other mammals, and of insects and birds, and the information processing and sharing systems of other organisms. It is in the a spirit of embeddedness and participation in the universe, that we need to listen to all voices – not just our own species, but also the voices of birds, insects, other mammals, trees, flowers, clouds, rivers, and mountains the complex communication systems that hum, vibrate and shimmer throughout the universe. We may think that we are speaking metaphorically or poetically when we say that plants talk to each other – but recent studies in plant interactions demonstrate that plants do communicate, sharing information about resources and dangers to their well-being. Plants listen to the “chemical chatter of their neighborhood species and participate in a “social network” via their root systems – the “rhizosphere”. Buddhism, like ecology, is a way of listening, a way of attending to this ceaseless multi-sensory music. And there is no composer or conductor controlling what happens, only an endless process of polyphonic improvisation. For, this is a universe at play- purposeless in its entirety, yet made up of countless threads of purpose, without beginning or end, yet made up of countless beginnings and endings- a dynamic relational field of beings and currents of existence.

The Buddha explains Impermanence: ‘Everything changes and nothing lasts forever. Everything from our emotions to our thoughts and feelings, from the cells in our bodies to the plants around us, is changing and decaying continuously.’

The Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra elucidates on the idea, that things are empty of any inherent essential quality, and therefore interconnected (Hanh 9). In The Heart of Understanding, Thich Nhat Hanh explains, 

You can clearly see that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain without rain, the trees cannot grow and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. (15) 

I consider this statement of the inherent connections between things both profound and worth exploring. 

I explore these connections through a process that involves translating images of nature into abstraction. I use abstraction as a means to visually demonstrate how elements of nature are interconnected. The forms I make come from multiple sources in nature such as water, clouds, and the bark of a tree. I use the repeating patterns found in these aspects of nature to create compositions that represent the landscape as an abstraction of all the elements in connection, instead of separate. I want my work to be understood as an image of nature, but not a specific scene. Both, J.M.W. Turner and Georgia O’Keeffe have influenced the way I use natural and abstract forms in my work.

I use this Buddhist philosophy’s aesthetic connection to impermanence in my work. The images that I make have an elongated format that cannot be seen all at once. I use this scale and presentation in order to connect the way a viewer sees the art and the way a person experiences an impactful visual. The viewer has to move his/her focus across the image over time, never being able to fully experience the complete essence of the scene. Similar to Nature, change that inevitably happens over time prevents an observer from perceiving all that nature has to offer within a single moment.

Through the medium of painting, I am able to express my experiences within the natural world. It allows me to think about, question, and explore aspects of society, and to meditate on the way it affects my understanding of the world. My intention is to create a body of work that will visually convey the Buddhist ideological thought. Furthermore, my work will hopefully motivate the viewer to contemplate on essential qualities of nature, and society, and live more harmoniously within it.

Going forward in my artistic life and career, I also envision creating 84,000 paintings based on 84,000 Gathas (Sutras) of Buddhist scriptures, so that they can be documented and disseminated artistically. This may appear to be a tall claim at this juncture, but I am clear in my head that I want to accomplish this goal at some point in my life.