Pillow of Stone

Most people come to Hawaii to get away from work. I think it's called a "vacation". It's conclusive proof, perhaps, that I am just not of this world. I actually fly thousands of miles across the Pacific ocean to an island paradise, no cell phone reception, miles from the nearest town, shower in water collected from the sky, eat exotic fruit grown by the side of the road.... so I can sink my teeth into work. Makes perfect sense to me, actually....

This latest painting commission is a real switch from the last one. "Sophia: the Thirteenth Aeon" was, relatively speaking, a breeze. It practically leaped onto the canvas and burst into the world. I could barely keep up with painting it let alone blog about it, as you can probably tell by the cliff-hanger ending on the last post.

Not so with this current one. I started working on it at the same time I started Sophia. Did a bunch of sketches in July, even thought I had it all figured out until it just simply fizzled. It happens, you know... sometimes the images don't feel right, no matter how much tweaking I do.

But it wasn't just tweaking I was doing. I wasn't given a hard-and-fast concept to work with like with Sophia. My patron is just emerging from his first Saturn Return and that's nearly all I had to go on. My own Saturn Return is behind me and that's where I'd like it to stay, thanks. I've also produced one or two paintings about it already, in my former body of work. This piece had to go deeper.

Astrologically speaking, it made perfect sense that a painting about this sort of energetic event would take a long time to crystallize... but with a patron waiting in the wings it's not so easy to sit and patiently wait for the muse to pay a visit. I tried to force it. It fell flat. Then one day it hit me. Like a ton of saturnian bricks.

I was sitting at the breakfast table, minding my own business, not even really thinking about the painting, and a strong, clear, loud message came to me. Jacob's Ladder. And it all fell into place after that.

The subsequent google-mancy turned up, besides a bible story, a Hollywood movie starring Tim Robbins, an aloe plant, numerous songs, poems and paintings, a children's toy and a form of body piercing. The following finds, however, were the ones that zinged me:

An image by William Blake, one of the grandfathers of visionary art.



A strange science experiment, involving a device for producing a continuous train of large sparks which rise upwards.



An age-old quilting pattern.

I also found this quote in an article about Arnold Schönberg, the genius composer: "on January 15th, 1915, Schönberg started on the text of "Jacob's Ladder" which, at this early stage of its genesis, was themed as "the union of sober, skeptical awareness of reality with faith." and knew for certain I had hit paydirt.

Make no mistake, I am NOT a bible geek. The story of Jacob's Ladder from the Old Testament was all but totally unknown to me until I started sniffing it out with my pal Google. It is the great mystery of the muse that the idea came to me at all.

Jacob, as it turns out, was a real jerk. He was a smartass and a prankster and managed to get his dad and older brother right pissed off at him. So, in an act of tough love, his mother threw him out on his ass and told him to go find a wife and grow up. Sounds like a classic Saturn Return story to me, hah!

And how does it go deeper? Well, Jacob has an epiphany. He finds himself alone and in exile as night falls - the proverbial "long dark night of the soul" - and in resignation and self-pity he finds a stone to use for a pillow and goes to sleep. In his dreams God pays him a visit and shows Jacob how close by He is: there is a ladder, traversed by angels, leading from earth to heaven.

One more Jacob's Ladder anecdote for the road....

I was at a dance event on Saturday and introduced myself to a new friend. "my name is Vibrata", I said. The music was loud. He nodded, and said "Pibalanda". I assumed he was telling me his name. "Pibalanda...what does that mean?" I asked. He thought about it for a minute. It was later revealed that he thought Pibalanda was my name, and was coming up with an interpretation of it.

"In the search to regain equilibrium, it is the grace that brings you to your essense", he said.

Wow, I told him, that's exactly what I'm painting about right now. Amazing.

Perhaps "Pibalanda" is the subtitle for Jacob's Ladder...

So that pretty much brings me to where I am now, in a peaceful, sunny loft surrounded by coconut-laden palm trees, a stone's throw from the Pacific Ocean, with a ton of color mixing to do. I'm once again going to paint on a DIY, Gilligan's Island-style bamboo easel, which somehow works just as well as the $200 one I have at home. Go figure.

The Thirteenth Aeon

Next week I'm going on retreat in the redwoods, and - among other more personal things - I'm going up there to paint. I have two commissions lined up - only the second time I've attempted to create two at once. I'm excited by the challenge.

The first one that came up is Sophia, divine feminine wisdom. I'm digging around right now, hot on the trail of this image, with a solid start on the design and a few details to work out. When it comes to mandala-like images, it always seems to hinge on what goes in the center.

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A little bit more about my process of sniffing out the image...

At Mindstates this year we were graced with the presense of Michael Shermer, the God of Skepticism, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating supernatural or pseudoscientific claims. I regretably missed his presentation, but this week my CD recording of his talk arrived in the mail and I eagerly ate it up.

Part of what came out of it for me was the segment of his talk that addressed the human prediposition to finding patterns. We do it very well, so well that it got us to the top of the food chain. We all do it, all the time - our brains are built for it. To some degree it's actually excessive - Shermer uses the example of superstitions: finding patterns and connecting data where no connection actually exists... but in terms of unravelling the metaphor of reality and creating meaning, it's a gift and a miracle. At least to me it is.

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So I'm sniffing out the Sophia patterns right now and started with some writing and links that my patron sent me. He wrote about his own Sophia insights, relating to the color of deep blue/black, and also to the image of deep space. The reference seems to be to The Virgin of Guadalupe, so I set out to find images of her.

First, though, I went right for the prize and did searches on Sophia. Unfortunately, plugging the name in along with the word "stars" only got me tons of photos of Sophia Loren. So I tried "Sophia, cosmic, -Loren". That helped alot. The first image that struck me was from a website hosted by the Sophia Foundation. There were some stars; not really a blue image, but intriguing. Another image on the same page caught my eye, a graphic on the cover of a CD collection. It was a familiar image to me, since I'm a student of astrology: the wheel of the Zodiac. This, however, was in the shape of a yoni. Looking back at the first image, I counted 12 stars: twelve signs in the Zodiac. Okay, mental note was made, possibly a pattern.

I moved on to images of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She is depicted in a fairly consistent way over and over again. What emerged for me abstractly was a dark blue cloak of stars draped around her bodily form in such a way that if you forget that it's a cloak and forget that inside is a person, you can see a yoni-shape. At that point I felt ready to sketch.

The design quickly popped out. I had broken personal speed records for designing a painting - with one flaw - that friggin' center.

Last night in talking with some fellow witches I mentioned my Sophia-research adventures and spoke about the 12 stars. There was consensus about the link between monthly cycles and feminine energy, twelve months in the calendar year and 12 zodiac signs. What my friends brought up was that though there are 12 solar months, the lunar calendar, being inarguably - in terms of metaphor - the female calendar, has 13.

What is the significance of 13 and Sophia? Today I started more searching and I'll let you know what I find.

Mushroom Cloud of Awareness

It's been a while since I wrote a full post. Now I'm about to start two new commissions and I'm anxious to record my process. My last commission, though, deserves a few paragraphs.

My patron and I emailed back and forth and spoke on the phone between NYC and SF trying to distill the image. He's a student of Tibetan buddhism, he explained, and was looking for an image that had something to do with the light behind all appearances, vajrasattva, samanthabhadra, light/darkness, masculine/feminine, clarity, wisdom...you know, all that enlightenment stuff.

I had a few images come to me but it was still too vague; too many directions to choose from. We emailed some more and I asked him to narrow it down. He wrote this:

"The vajrayana buddhist idea is that everything we're seeing or
experiencing is all front and no back, like a stage set. "Display" as they call it. Which our ego's holding onto for dear life out of fear, grasping onto it to make it more solid, heavier and heavier. Behind that though is intrinsic awareness, which can be experienced and however is out of category, can't put it into words, it never varies, never changes. That's called rigpa. Intrinsic awareness. Wonder what Google has to say about rigpa."

I wondered, too. So I started plugging it in, and got pages and pages of great stuff: not terribly visual, but profound and interesting stuff about meditation and buddhism. Here's a really nice passage:

Rigpa

In Tibetan we call the essential nature of mind Rigpa—primordial, pure, pristine awareness that is at once intelligent, cognizant, radiant, and always awake. This nature of mind, its innermost essence, is absolutely and always untouched by change or death. At present it is hidden within our own mind, our sem, enveloped and obscured by the mental scurry of our thoughts and emotions. Just as clouds can be shifted by a strong gust of wind to reveal the shining sun and wide-open sky, so, under certain circumstances, some inspiration may uncover for us glimpses of this nature of mind. These glimpses have many depths and degrees, but each of them will bring some light of understanding, meaning and freedom.

This is because the nature of mind is the very root itself of understanding.

A simple shape started to come to me. Often times when a shape starts to form, it feels familiar, and I'll start looking around for where I may have seen it before. I picked up a book I have that I use for resource, called, "The Self-Made Tapestry: pattern formation in nature" and started flipping through it. I was delighted to find an image on page 177 that looked much like what I had in my head! It was in a chapter on convecton patterns, and this particular pattern was called a "mantle plume".

Okay, back to google. Now I was definitely getting somewhere.




Seems that convections occur within the earth's mantle from the rising and sinking of hotter material near the iron core. Sometimes this hotter material will rise upwards in the form of a mushroom-shaped plume and if it has enough energy propelling it, it may even push through the crust in a volcanic outfflow of molten rock.



I started doing sketches and the shape started to become more concrete. Puzzling, though, was how this pattern was related to the concept of Rigpa. Maybe, I thought, I was off track somehow. I considered scrapping it and starting over, but first I tried a different google search: "rigpa mushroom".

People who use google a lot will know this from experience: If you look for anything long enough, you'll always eventually get pointed to a page or two about 1)sex or 2)cancer. So when "cancer.htm" came up in my search I wasn't altogether surprised at first. For a lark I clicked on it, and got a surprise. This page had an image on it that looked startlingly like the sketch I had produced for the painting. In fact, it looked an awful lot like a mantle plume, too.

The connection seemed complete. In spite of the creepy feeling I got about the connection to cancer (and even the connection to mushrooms was a little disconcerting), I had to go with it. I was being told quite clearly to go with it.

The painting really was a joy to work on. I chose colors from the images of vajrasattva and samanthabhadra that I found: deep blackish blue and white. Each day was a meditation on meditation: how did rigpa, non-dual awareness, arise? Here's another passage I found on Rigpa:

In the Tibetan tradition, they call the Wildmind "Rigpa" - the state of primordial radiant awareness. Rigpa, or Wildmind, is contrasted with "sems," which is the superficial, turbulent aspect of our mind that too many of us are caught up in. This sems, which I call the "wild mind" (using two separate words) is like the crashing waves on the surface of a vast lake during a storm. The Wildmind, or rigpa, is more like the still depths.

I imagined the still depths of the earth, the iron core at the center, and the thin surface crust layer riding above it on a sea of molten rock. I pictured the rigpa/mushroom plume of hot magma from the core rising up and bursting through the turbulent surface layer. Primordial radiant awareness!

Rigpa is always there, in the depths, connected to everything but attached to nothing.

"Rigpa: Wildmind"

During my time painting Rigpa, I had a Wildmind experience. I was lost in thought, mind-chatter and fantasy, focusing as if I had blinders on; tense; stuck. I took a deep breath and reached into my essence to quiet my mind, allowing myself to dissolve into my surroundings. Suddenly the room seemed to get larger: my field of view expanded: I could see without actually looking at anything: I was suddenly aware that there were sounds, without giving the sounds any names. The chatter in my head stopped for a brief moment - and there was just a breathing being

Can she "really" paint??

This is a detail from a painting I did a few years ago. Just thought I'd post it to see if I get any more anonymous comments.

A Matter of Time

My sincerest condolences to you, America, especially to you Democrats. If I were an American I would've voted for the less silly guy....Not that it would've helped a lot...

You're welcome up in Canada, it's been Liberal for a very long time. Just don't forget your mittens.

Now, back to work (and play!)....After all, nothing's really different today than it was yesterday...And we only have so much time here...

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Ah, time....

I'm hours away from finishing "Shoji", and once again, not a moment too soon. Tomorrow night I'll have it hanging at Braindrops for the opening of my show there.

I'm pleased with the results, though I wish I had had more time to do it. It felt rushed, and I can tell, though no one else probably will, that it made a difference in the result. It seems no matter how I try to simplify and refine my process, it always takes longer to complete one of these things than I think it will.

In the end, I think that the lesson I got from my two+ months meditating on life/death has a lot to do with time: using it wisely, treating it as a finite resource, taking responsibility for your own allotment. "No one gets out of here alive", as a wise American once said.

The image ended up surprising me a little. I don't always know how it's going to look until near the very end. Shoji is a mandala, and the center of a mandala is, by it's nature, the most important element to the whole piece. I left it for last, and after a lot of messing around with the computer sketch trying to decide what color the central orb should be, the answer came to me. The central energetic element to Shoji isn't an orb. It's a donut.

Okay, a torus.

Why? Because the center is empty. Emptiness...That would make Dogen Zenji especially proud of me :). It was startling, actually, the way the image just sort of figured itself out like that. Then again, it almost always happens that way - I'm not the boss...I just do what I'm told.

The odd thing about Shoji, though, is that the negative space is such a warm color that is projects outward, so it doesn't read strictly as space. It can also be read as substance. Wierd twist. I've also played with retinal after-image phenomena and created a pattern than practically jumps and pops like popcorn.

....so I guess this one's for my painting professors in university who taught that symmetrical images were "static".

Shoji

My new painting is progressing well. It's a lot of orange to deal with. My eyes get tired quickly from staring at it. The longer wavelengths of light (towards the red end of the spectrum) are easily absorbed by the eye so my eyeballs are greedily soaking up all the color and ending up pretty burnt out after a couple of hours.

I started wearing glasses about 8 months ago for the first time in my life. It seems all of the intense peering at canvases a few inches from my face is making me a little far sighted. My peepers are slowly wearing out.

Don't worry, they have a long way to go :).

Since my larger paintings take so long to do, their subject matter tends to seep into my daily thoughts. It becomes an extended trip, one that can be arduous, joyful and usually surprising. "Shoji" is no different. The surprise is that I'm thinking about Carlos Castaneda a lot.

Don Juan instructed his student to remember that death is his adviser. "Death is our eternal companion . . . It is always to our left, at an arm's length . . . It has always been watching you. It always will until the day it taps you," he told Carlos. He spoke of the power of living life with the awareness of death in terms of how death informs your decisions. How would you choose if it were the last choice you ever made? If you were called by death tomorrow, would you have regrets about your choices? If you were given a second chance, would you do anything differently?

In terms of the meaning of Shoji in Zen Buddhism, there is a slightly more non-dualistic way of looking at it. It's a compound word, like "lifedeath", implying simultaneity, or more of a flowing, wave-like process. There is no "instant" of death, but a transition from one state to another, like the crest of a wave of water. That's Buddhism for you.

There's a subtle anxiety created by all of this that I don't see as a bad thing. Keeps one on one's toes, perhaps. I suppose the sudden realization of Shoji could impel some people towards drastic life changes and frantic personal crisis. For me, it keeps me doing what I'm already doing in spite of a myriad of obstacles.

As for "Shoji", the painting-in-progess, the metaphor is unfolding in interesting ways. This is the first piece I've done in a very long time that has no dark areas - in fact it may be the brightest painting I've ever done. Also, in spite of its ultra-vividness, it's actually quite subtle. Almost gentle.

I'm going to leave this entry for now and let the painting talk to me a bit more.

Order vs. Chaos

The artists who worked on the NOVA production of "The Elegant Universe" (see my previous post) got it all wrong. It drove me crazy....they kept showing animations of these elementary strings: what the artists came up with looked like noodle soup; A random, jiggly, messy soup.

That's not how I picture it. Perhaps what I'm seeing is something more akin to utopian string theory - the strings are dancing in rhythmic harmony, each of them aware of the other and responding to the other while still doing its own thing.

Maybe it's a matter of aesthetic preference. Maybe when Einstein said "god doesn't play dice", he was speaking from his own personal ideal of beauty, which has no basis in reality.

Personally, I think randomness and chance are elaborate illusions. I believe if you look closely enough you will see patterns everywhere, or conversely, if you step back far enough the order of things makes itself apparent. There are no coincidences, as they say. The same laws of physics apply to every star and every galaxy - all matter & all energy - in the entire known universe. This is what's called Supersymmetry.

Symmetry in art, like symmetry in physics, implies balance, repetition, pattern. There's something calming about it. It's predictable, easy to look at. It's not ususally how we experience our world, and yet, if we step back far enough, or look closely enough.....there it is.

...but is the pattern there before we look for it? According to quantum physics, the very act of observing something changes that something. My buddhist teacher calls it dependant co-arising existence - when the thing being observed and the observer simultaneously arise with the act of observing. The holy trinity.

During a DMT experience I was confronted with a choice to make between two paths: a doorway which resembled a ragged tear, or a mandala-like portal with thousands of radiating, symmetrical petals. I chose to approach the mandala, and my "guide" instantly approved, the way a good teacher pats a student on the back for getting the answer right. My intent for the journey was to be healed, so the right course was symmetry, order and pattern.

Perhaps the intent behind Einstein's remark about god and dice was not so much an attempt to describe the world as it was to steer us towards the pursuit of peace and healing. Perhaps he foresaw that the choice towards chaos was the way towards more pain and suffering in the world.

It may be that the act of observing changes the observed, but the intent behind the act of observing determines how the observed is changed.