White and Black 白色與黑色

White is the color of snow, of the snow peaks of the Himalayas peaks that have remained from age to age, and remain untouched, unsullied. White is therefore the color of peace, purity, freedom from disturbance. It is also the color of centrality.

White color in Taoism represents purity and innocence. More actively, it represents the removal of all obstacles and difficulties, and thus the calming, pacifying aspect of the enlightened mind as the allayer of all ill and the remover of all sorrow. The sixteenth- century English poet Spenser captures well this kind of feeling in two

115 Sangharakshita, Creative Symbols of Tantric Buddhism, (Windhorse Publications 2002) P. 165,66

famous lines from his epic poem, The Faerie Queene: ‗Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please.‘¹¹⁶White represents this peace that greatly pleases, the peace which passes all understanding. Finally, black is the color of night, midnight, and the color of the charred wood of the cremation ground. In the context of the Tantra, it stands for death and destruction- not just physical death but spiritual death, the destruction of the ego, of ignorance of all the stands in the way of Enlightenment.

During the 1950s Reinhardt‘s paintings began to take on an increasingly meditative and less textual character with dark shades barely discernable from one another, meditations on pure color and form. ¹¹⁷ Later his paintings became completely black, and the deviations between shades began to diminish. In order to tell one color from another it was necessary to concentrate on them as a Zen monk might concentrate on a sand garden or the grain of wood on a temple wall.

Kandinsky refers to what black and white represent on a canvas. He also compares black in a painting to a profound final pause or ending of a melody. One where if you would try to continue the melody it would ―seem the dawn of another world.‖ ¹¹⁸ About dark (black) color, historian Suna Umari quoting Mark Rothko on his paintings for the Rothko Chapel. ―They‘re sort of a window to beyond… He said the bright colors sort of stop your vision at the canvas, where dark colors go beyond. And definitely you‘re looking at the beyond. You‘re looking at the infinite.‖ ¹¹⁹ For Taoism, darkness (Black) is used variously and needs a context to determine the meaning. Darkness may refer to the dark matter of the prima materia (Alchemy); the

116 Sangharakshita, Creative Symbols of Tantric Buddhism, P. 165

117 Westgeest, Helen. Zen in the Fifties: Interaction in Art Between East and West (Zwole, NE:

Wanders Publishers, 1997), P. 67-68

118 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Museum of Fine Arts Publications, Boston, 2006, P. 77-78

119 Interview on the Mark Rothko Chapel website:

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/01/134160717/meditation-and-modern-art-meet-in-rothko-chapel

balance of natural forces in Taoism, the opposite of light (yin/yang); a time of testing for the aspirant referred to as the ―dark night of the soul‖, by St John of the Cross;

used pejoratively to refer to Dark Forces, or malignant beings with destructive agendas.

Motherwell‘s favorite colors were black and white. And when colors were used, they appear flat and linear. These bore the characteristics of calligraphy¹²⁰.

American artist Frank Stella described that, ‗Black paintings boring to make but shouldn‘t be boring to look at.‘ Cage quoted that if some looks boring after two minute then look at it four minutes ; if still boring then look it eight minutes; if it‘s still boring then look at sixteen minutes. At one point it will become very interesting!

121 Stella‘s black paintings are may the death below to academic gesture painting. (Fig.

29)

Thus, all the continents of traditional Zen Buddhist cosmology have a color.

Moreover, the six words of the Tibetan Wheel of Life into which beings can be reborn as a result of their karma, and which also represent mental states that can be experienced here and now in this life , are associated with light of a particular color:

the world of the gods with a dull white light, the world of the Titans with a dull red light, the world of the hungry ghosts with a dull yellow light, the world of tormented beings with a smoke- colored light, the world of the animal world with a dull green light , and the human world with a dull blue light. Colors are very powerful in themselves. Each color has its own energy frequency, as in music, and will help the individual through the power of resonance to help any imbalances come back into true alignment. I had discussed the major six colors here that are Yellow, Red, Blue, Green,

120 Cao, P. 9

121 Kay Larson, Where the heart beats; John Cage, Zen Buddhism and inner life of artists, Penguin press, New York, 20012, P. 388

White and Black. Others colors and their various forms in Zen Buddhist Mandala also have a significance and power by itself. Some of them recombines and strengthens the overall significance of various art forms. This concept and the power of colors and forms of Zen Buddhist Mandala are fetched and reshaped in the modern abstract paintings and contemporary western paintings without disturbing the fundamental essence of the subject matter been developed.

3. 5 Conclusion: 結語

In this chapter, I presented a collection of the most fundamental elements of paintings – lines, forms, circles, triangles and helices; the basic colors yellow, red, blue, green, white and black. The components will form the basis of this research. It will consist of an examination of first of the interpretations of western and eastern artists, in whose art the influence of Zen and Tao philosophy are strongest. Through these fundamental components, the nature of influence can be dissected, understood and compared. For example, swift spontaneous brush strokes were used by Chinese artists to depict enlightenment. Similar strokes are apparent in a body of work by Franz Klien. Both were a quest to portray an idea using minimal strokes, an austerity that comes from Zen study. The color yellow of idealism and austerity, permeates through works of artists in the west and the east, as it does through the very fabric of culture and philosophy that seeks to know the self through Zen nothingness and to understand it through Tao‘s duality. Therefore, it is the identification of the fundamental elements that constitute a painting that its significance and contribution to the evolution of art can be established. The proposed work of this thesis, encompasses these ideas. It is envisaged that an analyses of the changes in each of these elements, variation within and across groups of artists, will shed light on the

qualitative nature and degree of influence of Zen and Tao philosophy on paintings from the west and east spanning over a century.

CHAPTER FOUR

ANALYSIS ON ZEN AND TAOIST ISFLUENCE ON ABSTRACT PAINTING 禪與道對抽象藝術的影響

There had been a tradition of Japanese and Chinese artists employing aleatoric (By chance) methods, many influenced by Taoism and Zen Buddhism. A loosely construed Buddhism was circulating through the European Aavant-garade in the first decades of the twentieth century. At the time, the exotic Orient could be accessed only in books and artworks. Especially European artists inspired by this philosophy and their composition were depending upon chance, random accident or highly improvisational execution, typically hoping to attain freedom from the past, from academic formulas and the limitations placed on imagination by the conscious mind.

They allowed their pens and brushes to wander over sheets of paper or canvas in the belief that they would discover in those doodles the ghosts of their repressed imaginations.

In the 1930s, increased Asian immigration to America inspired many artists to study Buddhism and East Asian calligraphy. American abstract artists developed a new understanding of existence, nature, and consciousness through their prolonged engagement with Eastern religions Zen Buddhism and Taoism. Japanese art and Zen Buddhism dominated in part because America‘s political and economic ties with Japan were historically stronger than those with China or India. ¹²² Some, like Morris Graves, absorbed Far Eastern philosophies such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism and believed in the subconscious as the locus of creativity.

122 Alexandra Munroe, Solomon R, ‗The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989‘

Exhibition catalogue. 2009.