Experiencing the Void

Incorporating nothingness.

The moment of emptiness that makes you happy. Being empty of desire is happiness. Return to your own source and you are happy. This is the trick of happiness.

- excerpt from This, by Papaji

Removing the impediment:

Ah…negative space. A most useful tool in the artist’s arsenal.

Have you ever been in a conversation where there was an uncomfortable lull? Did awkwardness set in between the gaps of dialogue? Did you need to fill them? Do your days need to be constantly filled and you label yourself perpetually busy?

I too have had those moments.

Where do we place value? Is it in the constant efforting or in the spaces between where nothingness occurs?

Finding and creating a space of emptiness is what these shaped works are about.

I draw so many shapes and forms that come to me organically without much thought. Many of them are just shapes. And then there are some that tickle the intellectual strings and ask to be made real.

Experiencing nature as I do daily, in stillness and in walking, I discover shapes between the leaves, forms immersed within the moss, patterns between the water ripples. These I accept as part of my world. I do not need to literally translate them into forms. Yet they permeate my consciousness and find their way into the work.

I pursue a sort of subconscious drawing to allow certain forms to take shape. Translation happens when I’m not aware of it.

As I build a new shape, certain things become known.

The strongest ones demand space around them and lots of it. And sometimes an interruption of space within or between. These forms have subsumed the environment surrounding them and made it part of the whole.

This is when I know I’m onto something.

Each curve and angle creates a pressure point with the one next to it. A tenseness happens when an edge is slightly curved and undulates. The emptiness fills the void. The emptiness is the void.

And it’s the void where everything simmers!

Something ruminates in that space between. The mind looks to fill it and in its efforts finds the pause. Then the mind realizes that it’s the pause that gives true form, making the work move in an unexpected way.

At least this is my experience of it and why I keep making these works. When I get to the moment where my drawing is made real and the parts are assembled together, something magical happens and I want to keep going!

Remember those “painful” conversations when nothing is being said and a feeling of awkwardness occurs? Maybe those moments are supposed to be about listening instead of talking. It’s the silence of empty space where truth appears.

And I’m learning to listen for it.

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.”

• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry