Currently Creating: the Bardo Dharmata Series
Long walks in the hot southern California sun along well-worn trails began to reveal ghosts of a recent past existence —- empty snail shells —ranging from paper-thin bleached white spirals to a more robust nearer-to recent life shell of ochre and raw sienna. I began to collect them and to realize the easy analogy they represented —- to the state of impermanence we all exist within — and to the spiraling, cyclical nature of all life and death.As my collection grew, I wanted to paint them. Simultaneously I was attending Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen meditations and reading Sogyal Rinpoche’s “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.” The snail shell seemed a perfect metaphor for the stages of death —- from the dissolution of Earth, Fire, Air and Water (the letting go of our earthly bodies) to the Dharmata —- or progression through the luminosity of white, red and black, finally to Ground Luminosity or pure consciousness —- Buddha nature —- body of light.
