Buddhism For Cubists

“I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterlfly dreaming I am a man.”

Chuang-Tzu (c. 369 BCE – c. 286 BCE) (tr. Herbert Giles)

In the West, we tend to think of ourselves as distinct from Nature: I am I, an ego that is separate, distinct from– and often in conflict with– whatever is not me, my own “self.”  From the Buddhist point of view, the cause of our incessant conflicts and suffering on this earth is trishna, our craving to grasp and hold on to what cannot be grasped or held on to. Two illusions form the basis of this frustration: The first is– there is nothing “out there” beyond the periphery of your skin that you can hold on to because nothing is permanent–everything is changing, constantly and always. The second illusion is– there is no You, that is, no “self” as a separate ego distinct from everything else “out there.” The “self” seems to be real, but it is only a construct, a useful one, to be sure, as the Equator is also a useful construct. But is there any actual line on land or sea that you can point to and say “there it is, the Equator?”  For Buddhism, in short, there is nothing to hang on to, and even if there were, there is no “you” to grasp it.

More than a century ago, many artists began to realize that the tools they had inherited from the Renaissance to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas, techniques such as linear perspective, for example, were inadequate to express the rapid changes of the modern world. The discovery of x-rays and quanta, the inventions of the the light bulb and the phonograph– to say nothing of the automobile and the airplane– forced artists to imagine new ways to depict the constantly changing world they lived in. Pablo Picasso and George Braque understood that one  drawback of traditional perspective was that it was based on only a single point of view. They wondered, was it possibe in a world of constantly shifting points-of-view, to give multiple points of view on the canvas? Their response was “yes,” and they constructed a new way of seeing, later called Cubism.

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The Vintners: Napa Valley

“How long did it take you to finish that painting,” is a question people often ask. They are usually surprised that the time to complete a work is much longer than they had imagined. Perhaps it’s because they think that making art is simply a matter of talent and inspiration, rather than hard work and sweat as well. For example, The Vintners took more than 900 hours to paint, that is, roughly six months. (Nine-hundred hours, by the way, only refers to the days and weeks of actual painting and doesn’t account for several trips driving from Grass Valley to the Napa Valley and back in my beat-up old Datsun pickup– 2 1/2 hours each way– to draw, photograph and interview the 39 principals in the painting. They included growers and vintners, a journalist, two restaurateurs, a professor of viticulture at the University of California and a banker without whose loans, one vintner told me, “all of us would still be unknown here in an obscure valley in California, stomping grapes with our feet.”)

Napa Valley Vintners – Oil/canvas – 7 x 10 feet

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Street Story: Escombros

“There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives.”

Michael Ondaatje— from his novel, Divisadero

My oldest friends in Spain are Toti Romero and her husband, Manolo Blasco; their presence in my life has been anything but brief. Exactly 30 years ago, in 1988, they opened their arms, their home and their hearts to this curious artist from California. During our first afternoon together in Valencia they fed my curiosity about words by introducing me to paella, the fragrant dish of rice, rabbit, green and white beans, saffron, chicken and rosemary and to the word, socarrat, the crusty, burnt rice on the bottom of the paella pan. That evening, Manolo fed more of my curiosity by guiding me through the narrow, noisy streets in the old part of the city, explaining that “old” in Valencian terms refers to the founding of the city by a Roman consul 2,100 years ago. He showed me the Central Market, one of the most beautiful in Europe, and the 500 year-old Silk Exchange with its gargoyles and twisted colums, and the immense Serrano Towers that were part of the medieval fortifications of the city, and the Art Deco Train Station, located directly across the street from the bull ring.
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