DreamMaking

DreamMaking The Intimacy of Picture/Reality conjoins words pictures and reality to provide a modern vision of non-duality in which enlightenment is ever-intimate with and transparent to delusion; right within enlightenment is the insidiousness of delusion and right within delusion is the ambiguity of enlightenment. The act of making a dream in the context of Dogen's Zen was engaged in the painting experience during eight years of study by the artist Richard Stodart six years of which included email conversations with Hee-Jin Kim author of Dogen On Meditation And Thinking: A Reflection On His View of Zen (SUNY Press 2007). Readers will find judiciously selected essential passages from the textual maze of Dogen On Meditation And Thinking chosen and organized by the artist to present intelligent readers Dogen's thought with enhanced clarity and excitement. Twenty-two abstract paintings are interspersed among the words which served the painterly praxis of understanding and expressing the realizational/dynamics of Dogen's Zen. The actional understanding of the binary pair of delusion and enlightenment as entwined vines of existence-time is examined in paintings such as Entwined Vines As One Side Is Illumined... Sameness and Difference Spring/Peony Flower Mountains And Rivers and What Is This That Comes in and through the dual seeing/making function of emptiness. An attempt is thus made to deconstruct (see)/reconstruct (make) a dream of delusion and enlightenment as great delusion/great enlightenment. For readers unfamiliar with Dogen's nondual dialectic of delusion and enlightenment DreamMaking The Intimacy of Picture/Reality offers a novel introduction through the co-focal intimacy of words and pictures/the universe.