Nihon L'OREAL K.K.
2-22-5-701 Yoyogi, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 151-0053 Japan
March 2006
My submission for the ART & SCIENCE OF COLOR PRIZE http://www.loreal.com/_en/_ww/loreal-art-science/ is a 3 foot by 3 foot oil painting that I completed in December of 2005, titled Kitaro's Intuition.
My interest in Fine Arts and inventive ideas goes back 20 years. My interest in the unknown goes back a lifetime. So my interest in combining the creative inventive process with ideas from Physics may have been a natural progression.
Kitaro's Intuition was painted with inspiration, and as an interpretation from Nishida Kitaro's book Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness written from 1913-17. Despite the title, this book is similar to the Tao of Physics. Nishida Kitaro combines thoughts from mathematics, psychology, physics, and philosophy in what I may very simply call, one mans search for the unknown. Kitaro has been labeled a Zen Philosopher, Japanese Philosopher, Psychological Philosopher. What I would term Kitaro is very broadly as a Thinker; secondly as a Japanese Intellectualist; and finally perhaps as someone that should have been a Physicist, but I don't think he grasped to what ends of the unknown this field would search.
All of the elements in painting Kitaro's Intuition resulted from putting all of my energy into letting intuition take over while consciously building the painting around ideas from Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness. Approaching a piece with such an overwhelming amount of intuition was a first for me, and it became addictive.
I began in this fashion showing the earths horizon in the bottom third of this painting. The idea Is that whenever we say something is level or straight, we say that it is level or straight in relation to the Earth. But if a straight line is truly measured in this way, then every straight line would ultimately end up in a circle following the curve of the earth. So a straight line is relative to the viewers position just as the speed of light is, and there is no ultimate straight line. The landscape includes earth tones for recognizability, but an other worldly or dream-like feeling was my intention.
In the center of the painting, the red square on the bottom of the floating pyramid was initially meant to be just a red wall standing in the middle of nothingness. The idea was to show this thing called a red wall, in order to notice it without the arbitrary bits of language and definitions given to it. These words linked to definitions, linked to the visual, all put a thing, everything into a box as the known. But what if the arbitrary sounds of a language given to it many years ago were wrong? You have to try wiping your mind clear of the definitions in order to see the thing before it was named. With a child-like innocent mind discovering the objects original face. Discovering the language that really may belong to it. The red wall is in the sky to emphasize its separation from a wall. To someone standing to the left of the pyramid on the ground, it may still be seen as a red square wall, floating in the sky. But what if this was all they were ever able to see or allowed themselves to see? The red square is also a 5 sided shape, a pyramid, and 4 somewhat transparent triangles. The idea behind not just seeing the square, but the more complex shape if we allow ourselves to, is the idea of not only allowing ourselves to see in the 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time, but beyond. Working with intuition, surprising elements like these 3 pyramids appear. I am wondering what the story behind these pyramids is myself. An obvious resemblance to the pyramids in Egypt resulted, but what is the message? Egypt's pyramids have been given all sorts of proposed reasons for existing, among the more exciting ones is interdimensional space travel. After they appeared on my canvas I did consciously paint the one on the right with a yellowish or gold color and the pyramid on the ground with a gold tip, possibly for light reflection. The lines extending from the red pyramid resulted from intuition, but I believe they are similar to the web-like grid pattern through the painting.
This grid of horizontal and vertical lines through the painting is intended to represent the web-like grid extending into, between and around all of everything. Within this grid is splattered paint and filled in intuitive/random spaces. A mathematical pattern for sure to a point can define it as desired by Nishida Kitaro, but the organic moments allow for ridiculous solutions that are often discarded erroneously as built-in abnormalities. For my taste, Kitaro was obsessed with math, but most likely these portions of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness were too complex for me.
The 2 circles in the painting are vague ideas potentially leading to different or the same dimension simultaneously or at different times. The differentiation is irrelevant when understanding space-time is connected and everything exists interdependently. The problem with understanding and visualizing more than the 4 dimensions of space-time is as the modern Physicist Michio Kaku said in Hyperspace, as humans our brains were built for the three dimensional world. Actually Michio Kaku's Hyperspace is what sparked my interest to visualize the unseen dimensions. Dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time. The bottom edge of the larger circle in the top edge of the painting is to guide the eye away from Kitaros Intuition with its four confining borders into a vast universe containing these universal dimensions. At the larger universal scale these dimensions on this painting may in size be nothing more than spinning electrons in the atom.
