Plan For Maitreya's Kitchen Painting

At some point, the working title of this painting was “Form and Position: What Makes What Which,” because my original intention was to explore the nature of experience and what makes us label some phenomenon “object” and others “location,” and how transitional and artificial these labels are. As usual, starting out, I just assumed that this could be done, this exploration. But as the months went by and I continued to work on the painting, completely changing my approach several times, the only thing that grew clear was that the original intention was conceptual and painting involved movement and application of paint and imitation of visual sensation, and it felt as though I was trying to explore apples by using oranges. When people have children and then plan to do their best raising them, they might think the best approach is to be very strict, or they might think that every moment they have to be very emotionally supportive, or some combination of the two. They might think that some child will need one balance but another child might need a different combination. At some point they might feel they need to stop thinking and rationalizing, throw out all the thoughts, and just continue from their heart, spontaneously. Perhaps when the child is grown they might think, “Well I know I did a lot of work, but did I actually raise the child?” Sometimes when I look at this painting, it seems like a dreary gray painting, but other times, even the gray seems to have glowing parts. But I don’t know if it will provoke in any viewer ideas or doubts about what the actual nature of reality is. Maitreya is supposedly the next coming Buddha, the one after Shakyamuni, after the world falls into a period of darkness. There are several ways I am planning for his coming but one of them is trying to see how phenomena, in and of themselves, are completely silent: they have no narrative in themselves. So that any narrative going on around them is something I am “cooking up” and applying to them. Any success I have in recognizing this is not only a plan for Maitreya’s coming, it is the actual nature of Maitreya’s coming.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:36 W x 48 H x 1 D in

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