Ku

Found a paper supplier online that I like a lot. Small operation, run by a woman who is very friendly and interested in the work her customers are doing. Ordered about half-dozen decorative sheets that happened to fall mostly into shades of brown, some with calligraphy, others without. Wound up using pieces of pretty much all of of them in this mixed-media collage, 19" x 20", along with some charcoal, acrylic paint, tissue, gold foil, and some other scraps I had available. There's some metallic bronze paint on there as well that doesn't pick up well in a photo.

This is one of those pictures that works for me just as an arrangement of shapes and colors, but that also one part of my brain working on trying to invent visual narratives that account for and resolve structural elements. This one was fun to make, and still keeps me entertained when I go back to it.

It is also a sort of little brother to the larger (2'x3')panel below, which I was working on at a time as a friend of mine was losing his battle to cancer. Nagarjuna defines the Buddhist concept of ku as "neither existence nor nonexistence," and I remember a sensei once telling me that life that ku is the state that the soul returns to bto await reincarnation. When I began working on this piece, I didn't have any of that in mind. By the time I was done, I did. Jack, this one is for you.