Richard Stodart

Dreammaking: the Intimacy of Picture / Reality Richard Stodart

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.