#O101: Clear Winds Turn

A landscape based on a photo taken on my way from work one day. A larger image and the source photo is below. In this painting I worked quite freely with the pallette knife, especially on the foreground.

After I started this I quickly felt that the contained ellipse of water did not contribute to the composition in the way I wanted, so I tried different variations and the one shown above is the one I finally ended up with.

Early morning I have been reading David Hinton’s book Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape. Here is a translated poem:

Autumn Begins
Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen,
and little by little, clear winds turn colder

and colder, summer’s blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still.
At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers.

Hinton’s commentary beautifully outlines the translation of this poem from the original Chinese. I find his prose beautifully meditative:

We are perfectly apparent, and it’s impossible, really, to locate a center of identity in the midst of that clarity. If I sit beside the pool, eyes closed as an occasional leaf clatters down through streamside trees, and watch the relentless industry of self, each thought and feeling and memory appearing out of emptiness, wandering through various transformations, and disappearing back into emptiness, I see that I am fundamentally separate from the mental processes with which we normally identify. Instead, I am most essentially the emptiness that watches thought coming and going, hears leaves clattering down through bare branches. And if I simply open my eyes again, I am suddenly and exactly as vast as all existence mirrored in consciousness and vanishing there. The center is beyond, made of elsewhere: streamwater tumbling through schist boulders, for instance,

Hinton, David. Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape (Kindle Locations 470-476). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.

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