The Unpainted Space: A painting process toward creative emptiness

An offering by Siddhena.

I am up early, before the sun
That first growing light
Suspends me between night and day

Looking is miraculous
How is it possible?
And then there’s seeing –

Do I see things simply as they are, or am I always projecting my version of reality?

Watching clouds pass, I catch my mind wanting to identify them, to compare their shapes to the world I know. On a hike I come across a rocky outcrop that clearly appears to be a head with a distinct face. I move sideways and those human features disappear. I draw a shape, any shape, and quickly notice how the mind wants to make it into something familiar.

Aah! The tagging and labeling game…

If the mind doesn’t have a ready label of some kind it soon finds a comparison (“It’s like…”) But when it comes to less obvious things I notice my mind is not so together. It tries to deflect my attention away to something familiar, or it goes into a sort of ‘vague-out’. Just as moods are less easy to observe than actual emotions, the visually ‘indefinable’ can often challenge the mind. It’s as if the mental faculty is reassured by complexity, familiarity and movement – while spaces, stillness, and just observing might shut it down!

I came up with a meditative exercise for my painting process. It is very similar to a mirror meditation and simply involves sitting and looking – with an open mind – at a sheet of white paper.

To give you the idea, it often unfolds like this.

At the beginning the empty paper is neutral, with an unfocused feeling of possibility or potential. I then notice how my mind is getting bored and soon enough the imagination kicks in, starts to see the paper changing, as if it’s not empty anymore, and something is actually there. My mind gets busier and starts to project its content onto the blankness. Many images may come and go, flickering like shadows. They might even appear solid and dimensional, almost lifting clear of the paper.

Then at some point the paper settles again and returns to its original state. Empty.

In Western art there’s this concept of ‘negative space’ – loosely speaking, the aspect of a painting that surrounds a main content. Often empty or at least secondary, it plays an aesthetic role to support or enhance the main subject.

When I was designing interiors I discovered how it is the spaciousness that creates a room as much as its contents. This had me looking at negative space in my painting.

Now, living with Japanese aesthetics, I have come to learn how in Classic Oriental Painting the unpainted areas are considered as significant as the painting itself, that the empty paper, the ‘negative’, is as significant as the painting, the ‘positive’ – the invisible as significant as the visible. So, the empty space is actually there to include the formless in the overall painting.

Meditation brings me to my inner space. It’s here between the thoughts that the great potentiality becomes available. What at first feels like a chink is the opening to the intuitive.

In my experimenting, these discoveries have led me to something deeper. ‘That which is not there’ in a painting is actually its presence.

Looking out, all seems busy
Allowing and waiting
It settles in its place

While Osho was still in his body he invited me and Padma to his residence to sketch a beautiful carved Buddha head that was on the dining table. That experience of being in his presence and drawing at the same time, is virtually impossible to describe. It was indeed Darshan with the Master because he was very close by in his room. Afterwards we received as a gift a small wooden statue of a wandering Sadhu.

It came with the message: “This is what not to draw.”

It was a piece of Indian folk art, somewhat unsophisticated compared to what we had been drawing, so at the time I took his words to be a suggestion on beauty. Many years later these words have a whole new significance for me.

When I think about expressing, in my case painting, it’s about putting out, building something up and giving it form; while expressing the ‘not there’ involves allowing the emptiness, and reducing or removing elements – as if creating in reverse. I ask myself how this is reflected in me and where will it take my art now?

Could it be that it will take me into the ‘what’s not there’ by ‘what not to draw’?

I was drawing from a Buddha image. Buddha images tend to be considered the reflection of immaculate grace and perfection, often becoming a key visual reminder to enhance meditation practice. And then along comes Zen to indicate something else… For me the koan ‘Show me your original face, the one you had before you were born’ cuts right through such notions of Buddha as perfection. Or Buddha as ‘out there,’ as the Other.

It unflinchingly throws me back to myself.

This message from Osho is still revealing layers to me – right now it is telling me that Buddha Nature is not a face, but origin itself.

Staring at that empty sheet of paper we project all kinds of images that could well include a Buddha. By coming back to the empty space, might it reveal the ‘Original Face’?

There’s a room in a temple in Kyoto – empty, with subdued and neutral colors in the washi-papered walls. Just outside the shoji doors leading to the garden there is a maple tree. In the autumn its leaves turn red and gold and in the late afternoon the sunbeams dapple those warm colors onto the shoji, and the effect in the space is yugen.

I love the word ‘yugen’ – a Japanese word with many enigmatic meanings, including ‘wordless’. It describes that quality of beauty that leaves you without words, but with the fragrance of the profound.

It’s one of four precepts in Japanese temple aesthetics; and that something so subtle could be a precept shows the depth and nuance of the Japanese sense of beauty.

In the West we might quote ‘Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’. Yet I can find in the subtlety of yugen another layer to this mystery we call beauty. It opens us to beauty that is already inherent in existence – seen or unseen, before and after any beholder.

Saying nothing
Suggesting much
A breeze enters

I have created a painting process in which I start with solid colors all over the paper. I then begin to cover that solid field with a small white marker. You might be thinking this is ridiculous, since I could easily use a big brush and lots of white paint to achieve what I want. But by working with the small marker something happens besides the covering over. Becoming absorbed and also focused on the tip of the marker my mind is drawn into the moving moment. There’s that feeling of both anticipation and presence!

And despite the process being the same the paintings are never alike. You’ll notice how a change of paper size or slight shifts of emphasis, timing, and mood bring variation and nuance. As the paper is slowly covered over, the darker background disappears – a game is underway between the mind and empty space!