GWENDALIN QI ARANYA
Artist's Statement

Being and Becoming a Zen Artist I have been drawing all of my life and painting for the past twenty years. My process has always been spontaneous. For instance I would either draw or paint things from out of my head, seemingly coming from nowhere; or I would draw an object in front of me, something from nature, in such a way as I lost all sense of separation between myself and the object I was drawing. When I learned about Zen Buddhism, I had this instant understanding. I read about Zen painting and other Zen arts and recognized immediately my own process: “Oh, I’ve been doing Zen art!” While the tools and techniques were different from traditional Zen art, the process was the same. This is what Contemporary Zen art is about, using the process of Zen art with the modern media and techniques. With this newfound affinity, I continued to just create, spontaneously. I eventually became a Zen Buddhist priest. As a Zen priest, my main teaching tool is my artwork. Through viewing my artwork, people may come to understand something of what Zen is, about life, and who they are.

My Current Work Currently I am bringing this Zen art process into multimedia artwork. To represent nature is common for the Zen artist as a visual depiction of oneness with nature. There is nothing simpler. I have always taken a different view of nature, a close-up view. Landscapes were frequently done by the traditional Zen artist, and they were done very quickly, as demanded the media of ink as well as the ever-changing natural environment. My representations of nature have been more focused. Rather than painting an entire landscape, I like to focus attention to beauty that we often overlook or somehow gloss over. So I will represent just a close-up view of a flower, for instance. When painting directly from nature one must be quick, and I am quick. With oils this means that a painting may take a couple of hours, as opposed to the quick ink paintings which take minutes! However, if one paints from a photograph one has a different experience. The meditative process is the same, but it is as if time stands still. One can go deeply into the object and get very detailed. This takes a much longer time and such a painting may take, rather, forty hours! And at times it seems one could keep adding more details, forever. I have been taking Zen photos, focused in nature, as we are not accustomed to seeing it. These I have been spontaneously playing with digitally with no-thought, as is the Zen way, and finally, I have been painting the results with the long meditative process of bringing out all of the details. One of my objectives as a Zen artist is to act as a mirror on the world, giving back to the world what is right there but unnoticed. Beauty abounds all around us, no matter where we are, but we tend not to notice it. It is our scenic background, all but invisible as we get caught up in our unreal worlds. I take photos, noticing small things we see all around us everyday. I focus them and make them larger so that we may notice them and they may pull us away, even just a little, from that stuff we consider so vitally important but really isn’t so very important. Through these pieces, we may bring the proper focus to our existence, bringing prominence to the natural beauty all around us, as it should be. I take time to notice and give back that which is given to me.

On Zen Art and African-American Art: I have found that this Contemporary American Zen painting process is not so different from what comes naturally to the African-American artist. Zen, being a mystical tradition, has a lot in common with other mystical paths. Likewise, Zen art has a lot in common with other spiritual art. With all spiritual art, the art comes from the spirit, deep within, and is not about what the thinking mind decides to portray. The African-American artist often comes from this spiritual place, allowing the art to be created on its own, working through the artist. In this regard, while I call it Zen art, it has a lot in common with work by other artists before me whose objective was to portray nature as it is, to wake people up to missed moments of beauty.

Sacred Spaces In addition to using the Zen process working between various media, I am interested in taking the process even further to include the creation of spaces. I am particularly interested in creating sacred spaces. I feel that spaces are extremely powerful as they engage people through all their senses at once. Within the context of interactive multimedia, this becomes even more powerful. There is so much more we can do to control an environment when we combine many media and available resources. In the past, my work has focused on capturing the world as it stands, either the “inside” world of the mind or the “outside” world of our natural and man-made environments. That often entailed depicting some of the more harsh psychological and social realities of the world today. Now my work has a more proactive focus towards effecting positive change. It is about controlling environments in a very quiet, unobtrusive way to open the hearts of people so that they might come to know themselves, accept themselves, and grow. My goal, therefore, is to create rooms conducive to just this sort of growth using all manner of art. Every visual object becomes art. In fact, every visual object simply is art, but for the most part people are not aware of this. Is it my imagination that we once were aware of this? That we could once feel so very much and had an intense awareness of our every surrounding? Today, in our technologically charged lives, we are so bombarded with stimuli from every corner attacking all of our senses at once that it is frankly very difficult for us to be aware of the space all around us. We even go further, often seeking out constant stimulation. We need, more than ever, places to go to get away from the incessant stimulation. There are ever fewer places for us to go to know peace within and without. In today’s social climate, we are less inclined to go to churches for this much needed refuge, and there are also fewer places to go for this in nature as well, especially in our abundant, overcrowding cities. I endeavor to foster and create a profound awareness of the space all around us through the creation of rooms designed for experiencing ourselves in a positive way. The rooms will be created with great meditative attention to all that goes into them, using all media to create each room. This is my vision for paving the way to peace through interactive multimedia, nothing short of saving the world one space at a time!