Beholding
The central image in this piece was a blind contour drawing I did of a photograph of Adi Da. After drawing the image without looking, I added elements of color to it and then abstracted it into circles. This ephemeral light quality is often the feeling that would pervade the space and my own body whenever I was in the studio with him, a sign of the intensification of awareness of the present moment that would occur in his company. At the heart of his artistic process was an artistic method of perfect coincidence with all that arises, such that the objective observer and the subject of the art are tangibly experienced in a non-separate unity, rather than a subject-object dichotomy. I would often feel and notice this process occurring as I was working as his technical assistant, where he would be including my own subjective content and process in the scope of his image-making, adjusting the image immediately in response to my own mind, and to the mind and subjective content of everyone present in the room. Our logical minds would resist this, call it impossible, but it was in such clear evidence time and time again that we eventually had to submit to the fact that it was undoubtedly occurring. Thus, at the heart of this image is that process of communion, and it radiates out to the concrete world as the open hands of beholding, or the sensory expression of perfect coincidence through unlimited feeling participation. Adi Da wrote about his artistic method as a kind of "open-handed image-art", and I have worked to discover a similar process in response to that creative impulse he so tangibly expressed.