THE SELF-ISOLATION RESIDENCY 13TH JULY 2021: DAY 471

I'm just going to leave this here...No. 107:
'Haboku sansui (broken ink), Sesshū Tōyō.'

As I consider the void in my paintings I have been drawn to reflect how other artists have approached the same  subject 'matter'; the work of the 15th century Zen Buddhist monk and artist Sesshū Tōyō displays an early  concern with the principles of the void. Of course Tōyō's 'concerns'  have very differing origins from my own, his being rooted in the spirituality of his Zen Buddhist beliefs, however there are enough similarities to make his work of relevant to my research. My primary interests within this area are questions surrounding the technicalities of how an artist depicts the void via their medium. and how that may then influence thinking around the subject.

Tōyō, as an artist  working within the traditions of Japanese calligraphy, is in essence a watercolourist, meaning that his medium, translucent pigment on a white ground, by it's nature controls the fact that he must always work from light to dark. When one considers the void as a subject in relation to this process one must concede that an artist working in such a medium doesn't actually 'paint the void'; the void is the negative space left behind, which can only exist because of it's relationship to the positive forms which the artist creates to inhabit the void.  

The work which I am currently using to explore this area is being produced by a painting technique which is in many ways a polar opposite of watercolour, in that I am working with opaque oils paint over a black background. The consequence of this technique being that I can, if I chose, paint only the void leaving the objects which define it as my negative shapes, thus raising the question of what is positive and what negative?