Studio Lone Mountain

Posting of my second ideogram for October: Friendship. The Chinese seal script of this character depicts two hands in agreement. The standard character seems to have the hands crossed or clasped. Friendship in this ideogram is indicated by the warmth of colors and the group of triangles.

My lastest painting in the Ideogram series. This one is Entheogen. The character in Chinese is associated with herbs, weeds, grasses. Is the yellow at top a flower, or a metaphor? Does the entire ideogram resemble an indigenous mask of a diety, perhaps akin to Hopi or Maya? Other ideograms at www.lonemountain-art.com/lonemountain-new.html

This new painting is Reservoir. (The image does now show actual hues, though close. The teal on the left should be a tad more aqua green; the blue on the right, more blue.) 24 x 24 inches. The Chinese character from which this was derived is associated with small bodies of water, as pond, pool, water tank, moat, and reservoir.

"Antiquity" is my latest painting in the Ideogram series [www.lonemountain-art.com/lonemountain-new.html]. The form is derived from the Chinese character for ancient, old, formerly. I had ancient Chinese bronzes in mind.

Part of my private collection is my new painting, derived from the Chinese character for "no, not".

New painting: Mountain Hermit. [The Chinese character usually refers to the Immortals, folk deities said to reside on a mythological mountain, or genies/jinn, the forces on mountains. In the American West, mountain men were fur traders and explorers. In the comic pages, sages and gurus dwelled outside mountain caves.

Here is the second ideogram.
Music: La Mer
(yes, musically it references Debussy's La Mer)

My ideograms are on my website at its own new page. [www.lonemountain-art.com/lonemountain-new.html.
Here is one of my newest works, the second one is the above posting.
Here, then, is Into the Light. (the element radicals are for sun and moon).

My last painting for a while derived from Chinese ideograms. This one is associated with sadness, grief, worry, and pity. Its title is Gloom.

New painting[s], a diptych: Form / Emptiness. And now the explanation.......
These two derived ideograms refer to the Buddhist Heart Sutra (the core of the large philosophical Prajaparamita treatise), which states "form is emptiness, emptiness is form." It points toward process metaphysics, behavioral attributes, quantum fundamentals and observational dependency, concluding that existence is not based on nouns or stuff but on gerunds, verbal actions that serve as nouns, and are mutually dependent.

In English, the first character is translated to "form," but Chinese has several characters that are synonyms pertaining to form. The sutra ideogram itself, found in Korea and Japan as well, variously means, depending on context (usually specified by a follow-up ideogram), appearance, or hue, or substance, or the material world; however, artistically, aesthetically it is inferior to the one substituted for this work, which means appearance, shape, and form by structure or conceptual category. A third ideogram synonym might have worked in the sutra, as it refers to domain, territory, boundary, or indeed the world itself, everything in perceptive existence.

[The painting is self-referential via brush strokes. The form of the Form ideogram has common vertical brushing while the green background space is irregular, turbulent, chaotic.]

The second stylized Chinese character in the sutra is typically translated as emptiness or void or space or hole. These meanings imply duality in being absent with respect to something. Another way to translate it, particularly for this sutra (which presents paradox), is "no-thingness."

The background of this painting Emptiness suggests a rainbow or prismatic color spectrum. A rainbow from ancient times has been a symbol of a non-thing thing. A rainbow is not a substance, but an untouchable appearance dependent on the angle of observation [40-42°] with water droplets serving as a prism that splits composite white light into the spread of component hues. We nonetheless name that form and can describe it, hence becoming perceptively real, but it does not exist alone.

In Daoism, Lao Tzu's treatise begins with "the Dao that can be named is not Dao." In the Bible, the first act Adam assigned himself was to name the beasts in the field and birds in the air, everything in the world, hence causing separation and differentiation. In the quantum world, the packet of energy that comes out of the void, or itself, can act as a particle that individually and collectively behaves as a wave depending on observational/detectional design. In the Hindu Upanishads, the expression is neti, neti, not this, not that. In the common world, we concretize the metaphor.