| Anthony's Zen (Chan 禅) brushwork continues the Chinese tradition in ink painting that captures the imaginative explorations, inner struggles and grappling with the Spiritual that the artist is contemplating. Chan paintings were a reaction against the austerity and stuffiness of the Imperial Academy's art in Northern Song, this new blossoming of the fluid and rolling elegance of the layperson's aesthetics exploded in the eleventh century where every common scholar-artist can find his identity through painting unencumbered by the slavish adherence to the aesthetic dogmas of the time. It was the Song period that is arguably the height of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Unshackled by the pedantic dictates of the Imperial Academy of Art where works were produced to serve the country, these new styles broke every boundary known as artists used the medium to express themselves and found joy in the process of making art. For the disciples of Buddha whom Anthony is a fervent follower, these exertions become a record of the many mediations as the devotee struggles to molt and shed the Self in its pursuit of Enlightenment, aspiring to be at one with the universe. This itself was evolved from the Hindu ideal of Moksha. It combines the first two of three meditation methods and tools of Zen Buddhism - that of painting, calligraphy and tea ceremony. The monochromatic slashes of wet ink from brush-hair across paper, at once unbounded yet somehow controlled, captures the violence as well as calm as the Spirit wrestles to break away from the confines of the corporeal leaving traces of its movement on record as an aid or spiritual guidance tool to meditation and trance inducement. Like the Mandala before it, each piece draws you into a sacred space by helping the viewer to focus and be transported into a different realm. It is a precious record of the artist's own journey through the cosmos in forms unfamiliar and yet somehow strangely recognizable from our own spiritual journey. The result is profound meekness and immense ingenuity that breathes the bucolic and salubrious, tinged by a mysterious sense of the morose, infused always with Nature at its most pristine and primeval form. It stirs not just emotions but the most divine portion of our sorry soul... | |
