Facets of a Diamond – Blog

Very many of my paintings contain a dot. Some more than one, but usually just the one – the One.

The dot always comes first, placing itself seemingly as it desires. (Sometimes that’s all I do. It resonates by itself on the otherwise all-white expanse of canvas.) It is the dot that inspires all the

It seems I’m becoming like a preacher: Find God’s love, and gratefully reciprocate to God and to all.

But I differ, being psychologically-trained, in that I regard the way to God as being through our mothers. To come, at last, to Know her as the Mother of Love, to live in

When I was five, I was hospitalized with an illness from which it was thought I would die. (Thankfully, I was only told this many years later!) Every day as my mother turned to leave me she would start to cry, and so would I.

But one day, at that very moment, I switched on the

Shin Buddhists invoke Amida Buddha to be transported to The Free Land, to Heaven on earth.

We come to Heaven through Amida, the Goddess of Light and Compassion, the Mother of Love. Through seeing, Knowing, our own mothers as Her.

I never know what I will paint:
not a scene, an apple, a circle.
Just what is There
– and unknown until it emerges.

My painting is nembutsu, an invocation, a prayer, to Amida Buddha.

But as Shinran taught, it is not we who pray but Amida who prays through us.

So my painting is Amida painting to Herself.

Film cameras, being natural, are strong, robust. But digitals, unnatural, are fragile, vulnerable. And so sensitive to our feelings.

Like all things on earth, both are imbued with spirit. It is obvious with my old Nikons, but with the digitals I must seek it, find it and nurture it – bringing it forward for us together

Brush still in hand, my eyes becoming clear, I find myself laughing at the painting. I’m surprised by my joy.^[1] 

Laughter, Hobbes wrote, “is nothing but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves.”^[2] 

Not in me – but through me.

“A new and shocking valuation of all we have been.” 
— T.S. Eliot

After so many years, the Realization that my mother was, and still is, The Mother. That she is Love. That I live in her Belovingness bestowed.

Whenever I paint, she as Her is always with me, guiding me, loving me. May you, too, have such

All that matters when photographing is the feeling – the Feeling of Belovedness.