Narayan - Mandala Prayer 2

Narayan - Samantabhadra Aspiration Prayer 16Min

Artist’s statement January 2011 by Lowell Boyers

I use raw canvas like the template of our mind which, before perception, is a fertile but empty ground we fill and dissipate all phenomena into and onto.  I use raw canvas because I want to make the paintings feel urgent and immediate like marks of calligraphy that embody the fresh action of the gesture. Time doesn’t exist in my paintings. I have discovered I can collage multiple events on the same plane portraying the way we experience the world.  The void like emptiness of raw canvas evokes a timeless open space that allows images to emerge from spills of paint and as soon as they emerge I change them…evolve them.  

I want to portray a moment in and beyond time, as if I could freeze in one frame the invisible network of all qualities of one's moments, inside and out. I believe we are experiencing one Big Bang after the other, so many in a given day, our attention withers in it's majesty. I want to portray that who we are is more like a torrent of a waterfall, nothing still except the field by which new moments arise from.
Each painting seems to reveal to me a different state that has nothing to do with name, place or date of birth, but instead focuses on the relationship to body and mind, reality and illusion, representation and abstraction... 

I came upon this by accident. Eager to find and allow process to define the substance and form of my work I began to spill paint, taking my hand’s expertise just a little out of the picture, allowing the tiniest bit of chaos. I call it tiny because nothing is accidental in my work.  The paintings are manufactured and manipulated chaos.  I’m interested in how images take shape and evolve as I allow the ink and the paint to flow and spill and move and mix and coagulate and gel.  I don’t start with or impose a figure.  The figure emerges from the events of the process. The figures are bodies rendered as outlines, these shapes are a somewhat autobiographical, mirror-like reflection of my own inner and outer moment manifesting, stroke by stroke with each color chosen, or not chosen, but the paintings are intended to be seen similarly by any viewer.

In the landscape of my paintings there is no distinction between the inside and outside of the figure or person.  The body is like a piece of music, just a texture to illicit reflection, swirls and diaphanous pours of paint, veils of inner and outer textures of the figure’s current moment. The poured paint is blood, circulatory system, bodily fluid, and at the same time images seem to appear and disappear in the paint as water turns into fire, heart into head, head into landscape, landscape into lung tissue, lung tissue into wind.  Everything is constantly changing.  I try to use paint and painting to examine that phenomena. 


lowell boyers