Title: Green Bodhisattva in Repose
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 64×54
Year: 2003 Sold
In the mind there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and believe them to be true.
— Buddha
This piece is a meditation on meditation on peace and meditation.
This is the first painting where I consciously centered the subject on its chakras as opposed to centering the subject left-to-right and top-to-bottom, as would a grade schooler with objects in a diorama constructed out of a shoe box for a class project. Let’s not play slippery with the facts (my computer never lets me anyhow) — we really don’t have as much control over things as people who look through telescopes and microscopes will have you believe. They can tell us how, but they can’t tell us why. Nobody knows why.
The subject of this painting, Kuan Yin, I saw in Boston’s art museum. The next day she and I spent some quality time together in the bus station before I ran out of quarters. Her green coloration occurred to me while I was hiking one time in Sedona’s Boynton Canyon, so please do not mistake her for Green Tara. The color is just a coincidence. A kosmik koinkidink. She’s just a wood-nymph bewitchingly sprung into life, that’s all. But that thing about Sedona’s earth energy vortices? — It’s for real. Trust me. The stacked, Asian perspective in the background is so damn flat, it looks like it was shot with the centerfield camera in Fenway Park then driven over by a steam roller. What a way to go.