Regarding a Question of Enlightenment

Painters will tell you of an interesting phenomenon: A single mark against a canvas creates the illusion of infinite space in relation to that mark. Once that happens, you may add more marks, more little shapes: hundreds and thousands of complex relationships of light, illusion, space and stuff. Each of these represent choices, often technically difficult ones, and in excellent paintings, complex choices rich with emotional and intellectual challenge.

But you can add more, and more and more. The space of the painting cannot really be filled. Once the spatial illusion exists, the horror vacuui, the fear of the emptiness, an art term meaning a push to add material to fill all the empty spaces, can not really be eradicated.

But without that first mark, that thing by which the space is seen in relation, the infinity does not exist.

All of this]of course is the mirror of the human mind. A painting is mud on a board, but one that serves as an active mirror of consciousness. The "I am" is necessary to recognize infinity, and I think, enlightenment, whatever form that might take.