Midnight Sun

A portrait of the artist and my artistic and Spiritual inspiration, Adi Da Samraj. Done entirely on the iPad, I first created a blind contour drawing of Adi Da based on a photograph that I had taken of him, and then created the textural geometric domain around that.

Transition to New

This is leaning into a new style of a kind, while also moving into a new period of my life. I'm very happy with how this piece turned out, and feel like it was a development of all of the things I have been working with so far in this digital painting medium.

Transition to New with Context

With all of my works, once I finish the essential image I begin to experiment with different "framing" techniques. Sometimes I feel that digital image frames add, and sometimes I prefer to leave the piece as is. This is an example of a digital frame that I like, and also an example of what I can do with any piece of mine if someone likes the idea. Essentially I always like to have the quality of a thangka, or mandala, with my work, so that the image arises in the context of a larger world of mirrored forms, just as each individual arises in the context of a world of mirrored forms.

When The Room Dissolves

What is the purpose of abstract art? Is it merely to be wallpaper, or pattern-only, or to provide some internal subjective meaning that only the artist who made it can understand? Sometimes when exploring the process of abstraction, I find that I am transported into a domain of perceptual experiencing that feels much more purposeful and universal than any mind I might bring to what it means. Ultimately I feel that abstract art can serve a universal process in feeling that is important and urgently needed in this age of mass enslavement to the constant conceptual buzz of television and the daily news. The art I have always loved the most is art that can invite a process in ecstasy, or standing outside of oneself, rather than reinforcing the sense of separateness and identity that we are suffering all the time otherwise.

If You’re Not Dancing, You’re Not Paying Attention

Have you noticed that the world is only arising in an infinite Field of Conscious Light? Look up from the doldrums of the daily news, look beyond the confines of your separate point of view. Notice that the world is Conscious.

Spiral of a Swan

At the base of the Mountain Of Attention, where two swans meet in eternal embrace, the arrow pierces the space between them and forms the two-armed man, whose crescent hands display his peace of heart, as a moon reflects the sun that lights her. Fruits grow from this meditation, the gifts of eternal remembrance and eternal self-forgetting.

Fire and Water YabYum

Part of an ongoing series I'm engaging, of creating abstract digital art inspired by Tibetan thangkas. One primary artist that I am very moved by is G.R. Santosh, who did abstract thangka style paintings. So this is my response to some of the work I saw of his.

Fire and Water Thangka Pt. 1

A development from the previous image, starting to create more of a thangka feel. This was something I spontaneously created one night on a meditation retreat, when I couldn't sleep. I had had a very interesting conversation about esoteric Buddhist meditation practices, and was inspired.

Fire and Water Thangka, Pt. 2

The final realization of this series, and my favorite. The meditation had become complete.

Midnight Rose Meditation

Another in the series of abstract meditators, this is playing on a number of visual references to Adi Da's Spiritual Teachings, but is my own artistic response to the process of meditation on Fullness.

Midnight Sun Meditation

This image was inspired by the artwork of G.R. Santosh, as well as Adi Da's artistic process. This is the first abstract thangka piece I created. It feels like an apt vision of the cellular process of transformation that occurs in deep states like meditation or deep sleep.

Samraj Tile

An image I created of a temple I was visiting at the time on Kauai, in the Hawaiian islands. This began as a simple rendering of the temple there, fusing my own renderings of the outside of the temple with its interior decorations, but gradually became a tile form, recalling the qualities of a jali screen or mogul design.

Always Overhead

Much of my art is inspired by the process that unfolds in the course of my lifelong Spiritual practice. It seems to me that genuine Spirituality requires a constant confrontation with the habitual limitations of egoic identity and causality in this world and in my own body, and a simultaneous Outshining, or standing beyond all of those limits, via a process of infinite surrender in Communion with What Is Beyond and Prior to all conditions. This piece celebrates that Outshining of the chaos of conditional experiencing.

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.

Perfect Coincidence

This is the central square from the previous image, shown on its own. A blind contour drawing of Adi Da, expressing the process of artistic communion I saw Him engaged in every moment of His art-making, as well as the Silent Radiance that His Company always invoked.

Toasting the Modernists

I enjoyed this piece, as a dancer might enjoy the music in a forgotten dream. It was reminiscent of a drink I used to enjoy with friends, and the mystic pathways we wove through the intoxicated streets of our perceptions. I don't remember who made it, perhaps it was me, but only because I was listening to that song that I can't quite remember and can't quite forget.

Learning to Let Go

An experiment with a different artistic method than I usually use, and leaning toward methods I might use more in the future.

Mandalic Prism

What if the entire universe is actually just a ray of Light fractaling through a prism and creating all form?

Infinite and Perfect Cost of "self"

The title is a quote from Adi Da's writings on the nature of art. The full quote is: "True Art is the Irreducible Beloved, to be 'Won' at Infinite and Perfect Cost of 'self'". He once gave me a t-shirt with this phrase on it, and it has stuck with me as a fundamental summary of what true art 'takes'. And also what it Gives!

The Shape Of The Room When Eyes Are Closed

Can you see it now?

Night Thrum

When art sings you should dance to it