richard stodart free and easy wandering
Begun in 1991 and completed in 2005, Free and Easy Wandering: Markings on the Way is an artistic reflection on nonduality as it relates to our everyday lives. Based on a nondual Taoist view of ‘Cultivating the Way”, and the realizational view of existence-time in Dogen’s Zen Buddhism, it verifies the intimacy of nonduality through twelve stages or ‘markings’ of the Way:
• Markings One to Five (Monkey and Sage – relating with autonomy).
• Markings Six to Nine (a Cultivator – relating with aloneness).
• Markings Ten to Twelve (a Hsien – relating with detachment).
Within this framework, Free and Easy Wandering explores the relationship of the already
expressed (dim-sightedness, differentiation) and the inexpressible (light, equality) in terms of their dynamic intimacy.
expressed (dim-sightedness, differentiation) and the inexpressible (light, equality) in terms of their dynamic intimacy.
While the allegory in Free and Easy Wandering might suggest a progressive path towards eventual freedom, it in fact critically reflects the actuality of darkness and light as a nondual unity of practice-in-enlightenment/enlightenment-in-practice. Seeking is finding. As such, Free and Easy Wandering explicates nonduality in terms that can help remind us of our freedom in the present moment within the context of the past and future. By erasing demarcations between practice and enlightenment, Free and Easy Wandering verifies practice as authentic striving, illuminating it as the bearer of realization. It thus encourages cultivating and expressing the ineffable within a creative process of authentic striving, allowing for expanded and illuminated possibilities in the context of temporal conditions.
Four additional paintings, Immortal Fire, Immortal Air, Immortal Water and Immortal Earth (symbolizing four parcels of the inhalation and exhalation breath cycle) provide a bodily framework that tests the order of action in Free and Easy Wandering. Viewed collectively, the twelve Markings and the four immortals are an invitation to inspect the temporal unity and dynamic intimacy in any expressed/inexpressible pair. Viewers are invited to enter the landscape at any Marking of the journey or to proceed along the path for a serial view.
Inspiration for the grid structure in Free and Easy Wandering comes from Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross, and also from Ad Reinhardt’s abstract work. Free and Easy Wandering combines the grid with figurative elements to express the relational process of the journey and to give the viewer access to its interior dialogue of nonduality. Its medium is acrylic on paper as well as on canvas. Eighteen paintings in all comprise the collection. A full-color 80 page book (left) is available for purchase.
Free and Easy Wandering:
Markings on the Way
Richard Stodart
An abstract series of the fully exerted life in which time
presences as all beings.
presences as all beings.
17 Color Plates
paintings
prints:
