Feng Shui Art
The Artist's Statement
What is the connection between being alive and being dead? Is it consciousness? The vibratory rate? The pivot of the eternal now, ever transforming was into will be? We presume our perceptual apparatus. For example, we did not know about brain waves before we had instruments to measure them; insects seem 'alive' and vibrate quickly, but rocks seem 'dead' since, as yet, we cannot calibrate their consciousness; we say that someone is 'dead' when their heart 'stops', i.e., moves at a rate or in a way that we do not measure. In short, we are acculturated into a particular set of synasthesic limitations, a paradigm where we neither smell color, nor taste sound.
Given that we are all alive reading this, and all will be dead, it seems reasonable to ask, in this moment of NOW, "what IS the connection between being alive and being dead?" The experience is universal to all humans, yet, everyone I ask gives me the same answer: "Gee, I don't know. I haven't thought about it. " And so, I ask my work. It responds with visual metaphors of womb and tomb, egg and stupa, alchemical topoi of squaring circles, winter becoming spring, earth swallowing water, water becoming wood, etc. Although linguistic constraints might make it seem otherwise, my interest in cycles-connections between east-west, alive-dead, sacred-profane is processual rather than binary. For example, the glass that appears solid, frozen and dead, is actually a slowly moving liquid!
Many others have asked this question. Nor am I the first artist-philosopher to seek visual resolution to verbally elusive metaphysics. Let me, then, gratefully acknowledge the many, whose legacy of word and image have gone before me, including the wisdom of the Hindu garbhagrha, the Chinese I Ching, the western Gnostics, and many others. Today you see them, dead-alive, prismatically reflected through the simultaneity of my art and your understanding
Art Gallery
Peace from All Points
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Non-Being
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Altarware
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20” X
24” colored pencils on paper
The magnetic compass,
only lately found in Europe during the Renaissance, was invented in
China a thousand years earlier. Each
compass point came to be associated with a shape, color, time of the
day, season of the year, etc.
North is black,
crescent and ribbon shapes, midnight, winter
East is blue/green,
cylindrical, dawn, spring
South is red, pointed
shapes, noon, summer
West
is white, sphere, dusk, fall |
12” X
9” X 4” clay and glaze
Together
two halves are a single stupa form in positive space, while the negative
space reads as a seated meditative figure, present in its absence.
The work is suggestive of the northeast in the manifest compass,
where we find: the mountain
(ken, the youngest son); the location closest to heaven; mounting inner
worth; the silence of inner development. |
4”
each approximately; clay and glaze
On a Buddhist altar one
finds water, flowers, candle, and incense.
These are the elements of north, east, south, and west
respectively. Often when
one culture encounters another, there is absorption.
Perhaps the earlier practices of feng shui, when they encountered
Buddhism, had their principle elements re-defined as objects on the
Buddhist alter. I have
found it very instructive to make many different sets of altarware,
e.g., some in their traditional shapes and colors of each compass point,
others to stack up as a sculpture, etc. |
Fire and Water
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Earlier &
Later Heavens
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Nest Egg
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18” H,
clay and glaze
When you move from the
early to the later heavens, the only relationship which is preserved
within the trigrams is that between fire and water, which moves from the
east west axis to the north south axis.
The primary relationship between these energies is also found in
the connection between the middle son (kan = water) and the middle
daughter (li=fire). Since
the element which mediates between these in the creative cycle is wood,
(water produces wood and wood produces fire), this piece has flowers and
candles floating in it.
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12”
square painted wood, clay and glaze
This schemata uses the
form of the earth (a square faux finished as yellow sienna marble), to
show the earlier heaven at the center and the later heaven at the
perimeter. This is a very
useful teaching tool for helping people to see the movement of chi.
The relationships between chi in its acorn form (latent=early
heaven) and its oak tree form (manifest=later heaven) is easy to track.
For
example, if you want to see the path of the trigram ‘li’ which is
fire, you can see that it moves from the east to the south.
When you want to see what happens at a given compass point, say
in the north, you can clearly see it.
(In this particular example, we see that the north is initially
occupied by the maximum yin energy of kun, the mother, and then by kan,
the yin water middle son.) In
this we see the destructive cycle (earth swallows water) the historic
association of danger with the north (it is more than invasions and cold
winds!) – and the relationship between the middle and the mother.
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12"
clay and glaze.
The
symbol of beginnings and renewal, the birth of the world, springtime,
etc., nest eggs will hold 1,000 Susan B. Anthony American dollars.
Full or empty this is an ideal gift for initiating - the newly
wed, newly born, etc. |
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