Vairocana Buddha

An Art Progress Post

Since January I’ve been working on creating colourful, enlarged versions of my Representation Matters series, a depiction of the Five Buddha Families in non-male embodiments. Of the original five, Vairocana (Vy-roe-chana) has been the one where I’ve experimented the most, which seems apt given the wisdom of Not Knowing and spacious possibility this Buddha embodies.

My current schedule with these pieces is largely still on target for completion towards the end of this year—around the end of November, early December—and due to how I’ve approached these, Vairocana is likely to be the first one I complete. Every technique I’ve used on the other four Buddhas, I’ve tested with this piece first. It’s nerve-wracking to do but also incredibly liberating.

One cannot be an artist in this world as it is without quickly learning that the art world is largely a racket. What is deemed “good art” and picked up by galleries and coveted by the owning class is no less subjective than any other art out there. Still, it doesn’t stop us, as artists, from thinking our work must be perfect in order to be valuable according to a very limited concept of worth.

Nothing kills creativity faster than perfectionism. Having a proscriptive idea of what is “good art” leads us to seek formulas for creating it, as if there is a trick we can find to creating something profound and beautiful and also profitable. The proscriptivism of white supremacist capitalism often threatens my creativity. I will think of ideas, of things I would like to try, to see if they will work. I will test them on paper scraps and play around with sketches. I can be prepared to impliment it on the finished project and still, when I do and it doesn’t look as I imagined, I feel like I messed up.

When this series is done, I will know what I learned as I went along and how that changed what I did on each piece. I’ve been working on all five of them all year long, breaking them down into the various elements (radiance lines to skin to hair to the background to the items they hold to the circles around them to the lotus throne to the outline to the robes) and choosing to work on the one that most suits my energy or mood or what I am listening to. But with each new element, I start with Vairocana.

With each new element, I make mistakes on this piece.

I could say there is no “wrong way” to do art. But that’s not true. There is bad art out there. There is art that sucks. I’ve made a lot of terrible art that sucks. That’s how I’ve learned to make better art. But the thing is, the best art isn’t without flaws. It’s the flaws that can make it interesting or remind you that it was made by a human being and not a machine. It’s the little errors that remind us that creativity is a skill like any other that’s cultivated and honed and developed over time.

This piece isn’t complete yet. It’s imperfect.

Even when it’s done, it will remain so.

And I’m okay with that.

~

Thank you to my incredible patrons and supporters. Without you I couldn’t buy all the supplies needed for these mixed-media art projects.

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