Gallery Artists
Tim McDonald
To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.”
Eihi Dogen 1233 C.E.
There is no single or set “nature” either as “the natural world” or “the nature of things.” The greatest respect we can pay to nature is not to trap it, but to acknowledge that it eludes us and that our own nature is also fluid, open, and conditional.
Gary Snyder
The land and its processes are the foundation of my art practice. It is, for me, a language—living speech whose syntax is water, fire, seed, stone, sprout, and time; the ground for a reciprocal—sometimes ritual—act of perpetual creation. I am engaged with an organic abstraction informed by Zen Buddhism, John Cage's notion of Indeterminacy, and a feeling of kinship with the rivers and mountains poets and painters of China. Exploring a visual language that emerges from understanding perception to be a natural system; one in which the perceiver is not separate from that which is perceived, I am seeking an ecology of mind that manifests in works that account for the invisible, the loops and nets, the energies that turn the world, or, as the late zen teacher, Shunryo Suzuki Roshi, would say, “Things as it is.”
Natural processes are invited to have a voice in the making of drawings and paintings. Inked paper is left out in the rain. Chunks of ice and frozen snow are infused with ink and/or paint and left to melt, refreeze, and melt again on paper, panel, or canvas. Pigment is carried along by the movement of water and left to pool and settle. A slab of beeswax is left to soften in the sun as sumi ink and/or oil paint infused ice is melted into its surface. Paper is strategically burned, sanded, and burned again. In this way, fire, rain, wind, melting ice and snow function as material as much as ink, paint, paper, and canvas. I am as interested in these works as histories, as poems, as compressed geologies, as I am in their being pictures/artworks. My practice is engaged with finding evocative forms in the materials and processes under specific conditions. It offers me, in the words of poet Gary Snyder, “an open space to move in with the whole body, the whole mind.”
