Orange Breaking Into Ochre 2007		“Change or impermanence is the essential characteristic of all phenomenal existence. We cannot say of anything, animate or inanimate, organic or inorganic, "this is lasting"; for even while we are saying this, it would be undergoing change. All is fleeting; the beauty of flowers, the bird's melody, the bee's hum, and a sunset's glory.” Nyanaponika Thera Buddha said, “all is anicca – all is impermanent”. He taught one to dispassionately observe change, particularly the change within one’s own body and mind. He shared his revelation that liberation is found when one becomes free from his or her attachment to that which is impermanent. For me, the act of painting is a changing phenomenon which provides insight into my intangible, impermanent nature. Painting is a continuous action of cause and effect, transformation, movement and change. The experience likens swimming in life’s perpetual stream and becoming one with her current. From the painting’s conception to completion, the chain reaction is governed by conscious and unconscious forces. I become an instrument, a medium, a transmitter, a participant of this continuum. From texturing and priming the surface of paper or canvas and applying layers of colour, to drying, cracking, eroding, peeling, and scraping the paint away. Images appear, only to disappear and emerge in an entirely new variation. Every layer of the painting indicates change.

Not only does the painting change, but so do I. My thoughts drift from one to the next provoking countless emotions and sensations to arise and fade. At times, I react with pleasure to a particular combination or quality of colour in the painting. I feel inspired; the image glows, there is a harmonious order, or a tantalizing tactility. Moments later, I apply more paint and the new image evokes discord or indifference. I feel frustrated. While experiencing aesthetic highs and lows there comes a rare moment when the painting’s whole composition reverberates with my finer sensibility. I stop painting. In the finished work I perceive something of beauty, although I can’t describe why.

Perhaps beauty is not the painting itself but its profound expression of change. A painting may bring into focus and freeze one of life’s fleeting, intangible moments for us to behold - a blooming rose, an aging face, a setting sun, a stormy sea, a child’s innocent face, a vibrating colour-field. Paul Brunton wrote, “The artist who succeeds is the one who communicates his sensations of ethereal beauty, his ecstatic exaltations, so that beholders partake, understand or feel the same sensations, too.”

Maybe immortalizing the creative flow of cause and effect into a tangible work is one way I can cling to life’s fleeting existence. (Not quite what Buddha had in mind) I do find comfort in art. In particular, I enjoy uplifting images which inspire awe. Also, just as I find comfort gazing at an ancient patina - weathered by external forces – I enjoy abstract paintings which appear weathered by internal creative forces.

Mysteriously, my recent paintings – byproducts of a creative process - resonate with my soul. Maybe because they present tangible evidence that my mind and body, thoughts and emotions are in perpetual flux. I find solace in this realization despite the paintings’ less-than-perfect surfaces and unstable compositions. In some way they express nature’s law of impermanence - with her macro and microcosm of moving particles, sub-atomic wavelets, vibrating energy, and materializing and dematerializing solidity. The paintings, with their marred surfaces, fragmented shapes, moving colours, peeling layers, shifting hues, mirror that which I am - Anicca - a changing phenomenon, a flow of life.

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