review

Exhibition: “Only Don’t Know”
James Memorial Chapel, Union Theological Seminary
September 9-November 1, 2013

Alix Ankele: Buddha Light, Buddha Mind
Sara Lynn Henry

Recently the Dalai Lama explained to a New York audience that the essential nature of mind is pure; it is clear light, and is indeed Buddha-nature itself.¹ Such a formulation originates from the Buddha himself, who is recorded as saying that we all have “an innately luminous mind which is only adventitiously covered by defilements.”² In other words, these defilements, the afflictions and delusions of our ego-self, emerge by chance rather than as essential properties of our being. They are, in a sense, as tradition tells us, like clouds that partially cover the radiant sun of our Buddha-mind. These clouds can be removed through meditation and through practices that allow us to ultimately become enlightened. We all have that innate ability, as do all sentient beings, to become the light of that deep Buddha-mind.

Alix Ankele’s current paintings bring us into this luminous space of mind with intimations of an underlying Buddha-nature. She creates pure atmospheric color that overlaps, shapes, flows, marks, and opens into deep space. Colors are surprising, hot, warm, and bright cool, some from the tube and some mixed and blended into the wet. Sometimes transparent color overlays a dried color, or rich pigment is brushed into an oil-base color. She even can paint on top of an old dried painting to layer her atmospheres. As in Todatsu, 2013, (Fig.1) there are hot magentas, tangerines, oranges, mottled ochres, blues, and flares of purple.

The touch is barely visible, mostly accomplished by the tangible softness of a palette knife. Not for her the ego stroke of the Abstract Expressionists, not for her the overt body gesture, emotion, or conceptual thought. Rather she is impelled by a non-ego consciousness. The title of her Todatsu lends to our understanding of her approach. With the Japanese “to” meaning “transparent, such as clear to the bottom of water,” and “datsu,” indicating emancipation or freedom, like a snake shedding its skin.

Ankele has discovered her creative process through thirty years of Buddhist practice. From the Zen Master Seung Sahn has come the concept of “Don’t Know Mind.” This is the mind before thinking, free of self-consciousness or ego. This is the mind that moves through and beyond afflictions and delusions until it becomes clear, like space. Master John Daido Lori says that in a Zen creative process, “there is no overt intent…the art just slips through the intellectual filters without conscious effort and without planning.” As with the Taoist concept of “wu-wei,” there is “a continuous stream of spontaneity that emerges from the rhythms of circumstances.”³ Ankele talks of “simply enjoying the process of putting paint on the canvas while attending to the ongoing juxtapositions of color, shape, and texture.”⁴ Free of a defined goal, her intuitive aesthetic is in full play. This helps to explain why each canvas is different and each has surprising occurrences and self-discovered organizational modalities.

We can ask what it is like to enter into the luminous spaces of her works. We seem to be floating in a universe. There are found shapes and marks up-front, movements within atmospheres, and layers and breaks into deep space. We can find ourselves fully up-front here, yet way out there at the same time. This is a meditative space but not one of quiescence, nor mantra or prayer, but rather one of dramatic flows, cascades, fissures, and openings, as in Jade Dragon, 2012, (Fig.2).

These are intimations of a flux of consciousness, rich exploring, creating. The forms at the same time indicate a cosmic flux. Several have brilliant nebular clouds floating over a deep blue space (Todatsu, 2013, and Tracing Back the Radiance, 2011, Fig. 3), and another has a vertical rush of light, with an explosive spherical burst behind it Ziji,⁵ 2011(Fig. 4).

None of her images have boundaries; all open out at top/bottom, and left/right into a seemingly infinite space beyond the picture format. Movements defy a rooted gravity, having no base, nor spherical attraction.

These forms seem rather to be nebular densities undergoing constant generation and reconfiguration. One exception is a cosmic orb partially overlaid with a drama of drips, flares, and obfuscations (Fig. 5 ). The glowing orb throbs with life-producing energies at the heart of its own fiery universe much like the phenomena found in deep-space telescope images of stars emerging within gaseous nebular clouds. This particular painting also coincidentally invokes the sun of true Buddhist mind that emerges through the flux of ego clouds, the sun shining through as our true nature. (Blooming Your Life, 2012).

Ankele’s images simultaneously explore both inner and outer spaces. Her forms resonate with the Buddhist understanding of “emptiness,” which is the base of all being. Emptiness is a fullness that has no-thingness; it is devoid of any fixed or essential form, yet always luminous and in constant transformation. As Philip Kapleau said, emptiness is “living, devoid of mass, unfixed, beyond an individuality, the matrix of all being and non-being.”⁶

Buddha-nature, as tradition tells us, is itself “emptiness.” Ankele’s images give us intimations, then, of both the depths of Buddha consciousness and the vast life of cosmic phenomena.

-- Sara Lynn Henry, Ph. D.,
Independent Curator,
Professor of Art History and NEH
Distinguished Professor Humanities, Emeritas
Drew University
January, 2014