A Cup of Emptiness - Contemporary Abstract Painting

I am nothing; I see all… (Emerson)

As the borders of the ego dissolve there is a higher state of “indifference”. A no-tone, or a single tone (“It rained all afternoon in a single tone” – Garcia Marquez). It is a stripping down of habitual thinking toward a meditative detachment. A detachment that precipitates emptiness both as paradox and as oxymoron: nothing is.

It is the ultimate state of purity: bare, beholding. Seeing clearly for the first time (always the first time, thereafter).

What is emptiness? Emptiness is the jettison of any fixed views that results in awareness of the “empty” or “open” nature of things. Dogen (13thC.) writing On the Nature of Things [Hossho] in the Shobogenzo: “Emptiness means that things in themselves are indefinable; being dependent on relations, things are said to have no individual or absolute nature of their own. It is this nonabsoluteness which is called emptiness.”

The experience of things depends on the mind and are not the supposed things in themselves. Thus the nature of things in themselves is said to be inconceivable, beyond description, or “empty”.

Relative, identityless, not separate from the world of contingencies. It too, is contingently configured. “To experience emptiness is not a descent into an abyss of nothingness nor an ascent into a separate realm. It is a recovery of the freedom to configure (read, freely creative) oneself as an intentional, unimpeded trajectory through the shifting, ambiguous sands of life: it gives us a glimpse of what enables anything to happen at all.” (Stephen Batchelor)

Abstract art gives vision to the emptiness from *within.*Only that?Only that!Red, blue, black, drip, scrape, brush; white: what do you see?

“A burning to come to whiteness and ascetic innocence” (John Malcolm Brinnin)? “The whiteness that is ultimate intellect” (Wallace Stevens)?

To the painter on the painter’s path the great image has no form.In short, abstract process painting is no-painting painting.Think of traditional Chinese painting and how painters treated negative space. Take a look at enso paintings of Japanese Zen masters, try to understand haiku’s “cut-words”; terms like “no-mind” and “no-self”. Similarly, the pregnant pause in music or the plenum that can be found between words and page.Until in-sight awakens the sleepy eye and pierces the physical fixity of things: paint, paint, paint.Stop checking everything you do. Finish your homework. Save yourself from suffering:

Buddha says emptinessIs relinquishing opinions.Believers in emptinessAre incurable.Nargarjuna, 2nd century CE

What is this? What do you see? What do you see?

Among twenty snowy mountainsThe only moving thingWas the eye of the blackbird.Wallace Stevens