Beth Walsh
Membership Info
- Last Name
- Walsh
- First Name
- Beth
- Website
- http://www.jpaa.org
- Check this box to request a gallery space on the DAC website.
- Media
- oil on canvas
- Statement
What began several years ago as an exploration into the energy and confidence expressed in ch'an and zen calligraphy, developed into a search for a personal experience of the kinesis in this form. The fluid energy in ch'an brush strokes attracted me. The spirit of ch'an-inspired Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, in particular the "crazy writing? style of ch'an calligraphy, suggests the underlying root of ch'an itself: that unrehearsible response to a situation in the Now. I attend to the energy of ch'an writing, the push and pull of negative space around the characters, the movements coming from a place of absolute confidence tempered with discipline. Making a number of these pictographs into transparencies, I have layered some of them on top of one another and invented an "alphabet? of new forms. I create designs based on methods of repetition therefore a simple form can be expressed in a multitude of ways. Through this process the forms are able to take on a life of their own.
Fearlessly immersing ourselves in life is the root of spiritual experience. Using language, we impose our sense of order on the world in an attempt to organize everything according to our own temporal needs. By doing so we create the illusion of safety and predictability: a relative and only apparent homogeneity. Nevertheless, just out side this small world, behind a thin tissue of mental constructs lurks transcendence. We constantly struggle to avoid stepping outside to transcend our temporal order. The ch'an calligraphers knew this as they practiced "crazy writing?; we know it whenever we create or seek a break from our rigid ordering of the world.
We can allow ourselves to meet life, recognize our inseparability from it, and know what it means to be infinite Being. Through my work I attempt to reveal how we can use language itself to subvert the rigid conditioning of our daily lives and experience the limitless life and potential in a single moment lived in absolute freedom.
