Painting the Dao

40 between the world of red dust and its transcendent counterpart. Whether this meditational transformation is achieved through a strange stone, a blossom-covered cave entrance or a landscape painting is only a difference in means, not meaning. I became accustomed to finding myself lost in landscape paintings and strange stones, and understood the meditative calm of transcending the intellect in a temporary but timeless experience, like a music listener who for a few brief moments becomes the music, without distinction between self and environment. 8 It is easy enough to learn how to paint if you have a driving reason to do so. If you want to become proficient in painting hares, with a few field trips, a camera or sketch pad, some internet searches and exploration of how other artists have painted them, you will rapidly be able to paint them convincingly. Maybe not as well as Dürer, but with no rules in play, you don’t need to paint like anyone else; just paint a hare the way you paint a hare. Therein lies a fundamental key to painting as a creative activity: the audience isn’t in search of a mimetic image of a hare; it knows what they look like. The audience is looking to be intrigued by the artist’s interpretation of the essence of hare. Learning to paint by starting with years of rigorous technical training before being let loose in the fields of expression has worked for millennia, but it relies on distinctions and rules: distinctions between what you are and what you should be as an artist, and rules as to how to go about unifying the two. Many fall along the way, exhausted or disillusioned or bored. But reverse the process and be an artist first, and then learn what you need to, and it is easier and far more fun. You will end up creating your own visionary images without the fear of failure and disillusionment. If you are not afraid to fail for a while, you will quickly learn to succeed just by enjoying the process. In process aesthetics the product is de-emphasised, so that if you’ve had fun making it, even if it ends up in the bin you have fulfilled the func- tion of art as process. You don’t even need to paint anything specific at first; just enjoy the languages of form, line, colour and texture. It is very difficult to spend time having as much fun as uninhibited painting provides without beginning to produce something you begin to find meaningful. But keep in mind that what is meaningful for you may not be so for others, and vice versa. No rules. What matters is authenticity, at every level of the process. 9 Through my artist friends I soon came to recognise the importance of the theoretical foundations of creativity, and by the time I settled in Hong Kong I was well on the way to a theory of art and consciousness, although it took several decades to refine.