Smile of Buddha

-Light and insight-

The dharmas are one and the ox is symbolic. When you know that what you need is not the snare or set-net but the hare or fish, it is like gold separated from the dross, it is like the moon risign out of the clouds. The one ray of light serene and penetrating shines even before days of creation.

D.T Suzuki's translation from Kakuan Shien, Zen Oxherding Pictures.

Agnes Martin, Asd Reinhardt, Robert Irwin

According to Irwin: "At one point I thought the term 'nonobjective' was going to translated to nonobject, this idea of the phenomenon, but all of sudden I discovered that it had nothing to do with object/nonobject at all; it had to do with relationships, and the whole idea of conditioned realtions."

Light is a primary medium for Irwin, who is acutely conscious of his moment in time:

There is simply no real seperation line, only an intellectual one, between the object and its time environment. there are completely interlocking : nothing can exist in the world independent of all the other things in the world. To me, the whole history of contemporary art starts out as a highly informed and highly sophisticated pictorial activity. But by the time I arrive on the scene, as a post abstract expressionist, there is at least the possibility of looking at the world as a kind of continuum, rather than as a collection of broken up and isolated events.


"Continuum" encompasses the self, the work of art, and the viewer within a boundless universe of time and space, a universe of interrelationship.

Maurice Merleau Ponty, whose Phenomenology of Perception, analyzed the "phenomenal body" who experiences within time and space. The experiential, constructive nature of the act of seeing