6 February 2021
Kill the Buddha!
When I think about how much joy I have in my life today I’m really grateful because it wasn’t always so. In my previous life I believe I was a pretty gloomy fellow and I was always looking for some way out of myself. What is happiness if it’s not small doses of joy each day as if microdosed like an Irish mist of bliss?
To be honest, most of these painting sessions give me great joy. I can admit it now at this stage of my life. This joy is composed of satisfaction but surprise too, it’s as close as I’ll ever get to a pink cloud.
I really enjoyed painting this study from a few nights back. One of four, it was like gulping down a Perrier on a hot day with a lemon twist in it. The bright rich yellow against that pale lime strip of sky also reminds me of the ripe wheat fields of the Luberon before they’re cut in July. Yes, it’s a seascape done in Australia, but it’s also a postcard from France that sends me nostalgia. Is that why I feel this particular joy upon seeing it? Certain wise folks in the East say that happiness is but the by-product of living creatively and making right choices in life. So isn’t this joy of mine the same by-product of just painting a picture after all? Can I think of it as the icing on the cake?
Although my heart and soul still floats over Europe like I’m in a blimp, I’m still reminded that it’s in in my newly adopted country here on the Pacific where a part of me, heretofore unknown, came alive.
What I know is that I needed to find something different, a new place where I could discover something unexamined in a creative way. I only vaguely felt this before changing continents because I was under the shadow of too many ghosts in France and Italy, but in America too.
Having painted in France for such a long time I also understood that I no longer wanted to paint as a student of anyone else anymore. Nor did I wish to have any master hanging overhead like an old crucifix, not Cézanne, or anyone else, not even my beloved teacher Léo Marchutz, for whom I owe everything.
They say in some Buddhist circles in Japan that when you see the Buddha, you should kill it. I’ve always loved that expression. I think even the Buddha himself used to say it. It not easy to grasp and perhaps it goes against all of what we were brought up to believe in the West. In order to be reborn, even creatively, I think, we must kill even our most beloved parents and teachers whose love has nurtured us and to whom we owe our intellectiual curiosity. We need sharp machetes to clear out a pathway for ourselves. Though my own attempts at slashing away my conditioned responses in life haven’t been entirely successful because I’m still fairly neurotic, I keep at it regardless. I also know that my education in Painting will always be a kind of ghost hanging around me like a siamese twin no matter where I paint and I will always carry around my French palette full of light.
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