Shambhala Sun | September 2009
You'll find this article on page 56 of the magazine.

30 Years of Buddhism in America: Art & Artists

Inspired by the dharma art teachings of its founder, the Shambhala Sun is known for the beauty of its art and design. Continuing our celebration of the Sun’s 30th anniversary, we showcase seven featured artists whose work manifests the qualities of awakened mind. The commentary is by the Shambhala Sun’s art director, Liza Matthews.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

"Genuine art—dharma art—is simply the activity of nonaggression," said Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Trungpa Rinpoche was one of the most important Buddhist teachers of the twentieth-century, and founder of this magazine. He was also a multi-talented artist. Trained as a child in Tibet in the traditional arts of calligraphy, painting, monastic dance, and poetry, on his arrival in the West he immersed himself in the pursuit of new artistic disciplines, including Japanese flower-arranging, photography, design, and filmmaking. In addition he brought fresh approaches to the traditional arts he had been taught, as seen in this example of his calligraphy. Titled "Great Eastern Sun," it combines Tibetan script, three of his seals, and, on the left, the mark he used in the Shambhala teachings to symbolize primordial wisdom, which he called the Ashe stroke.

Trungpa Rinpoche taught extensively on the path of dharma art, which he said "springs from a certain state of mind on the part of the artist that could be called the meditative state. It is an attitude of directness and unselfconsciousness in one’s creative work." Chögyam Trungpa’s many works of art and his talks on art remain a vivid and unique legacy, and a portal to understanding the power of art in everyday life as a means to influence the world. For more on these teachings, see True Perception: The Path of Dharma Art (Shambhala Publications, 2008).

Don Farber

Over the years, more of Don Farber’s photographs have appeared on our covers and pages than those of any other photographer, for the good reason that he has made it his life’s work to document the spread of Buddhism in America, as well as the survival of many Buddhist lineages in Asia. He has done this without bias toward any particular Buddhist tradition, and with the view that all three major schools—Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana—are equally important manifestations of the Buddha’s teachings. In 1977, he began photographing at the Vietnamese Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles, which resulted in the book Taking Refuge in L.A. , published by Aperture in 1987. In 1989, after more than ten years of photographing, studying, and practicing Buddhism in Los Angeles, Farber established the Dharma Heritage Project to photograph Buddhist life internationally. He has been to nine countries to date, and hopes to photograph and film Buddhist life in all the traditional Buddhist countries, as well as in the West. Farber’s forthcoming book, His Holiness the Dalai Lama: Photography by Don Farber, is being published by teNeues in September. Pictured here is a Farber photograph of Thich Nhat Hanh; for more examples of his work, see www.buddhistphotos.com.

Kaz Tanahashi

For centuries Zen calligraphers have painted black ink circle paintings (ensos) to symbolize oneness. A multicolored enso, as fresh and iconoclastic as the artist who made it, was on our cover in May, 2002, and more of his circles, ideograms, and other paintings have been featured in the magazine since then. The artist, Kazuaki Tanahashi, is also a Zen scholar, translator, peace activist, aikido master, calligraphy teacher, and writer. Having trained in his native Japan, he came to the West in 1977 and has been teaching and exhibiting worldwide ever since.

His calligraphy workshops have brought the ancient path of brush calligraphy to thousands of students, and his wisdom and integrity give life and relevance to this contemplative art. As he says about drawing a line with a brush, “The quality of the line is what matters most—how deep, strong, or honest it is. It doesn’t matter how good or unusual it looks.” He adds, "If your personality is interesting enough, the line will be interesting. To do this, you have to be fearless." Pictured here is a Tanahashi work titled "Recycle"; more of his work is at www.brushmind.net

Bill Viola

Internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists, Bill Viola says his videos and installations are "art for transformation, meant to serve for cultivating knowledge of how to be in the world, for going through life. It is useful for developing a deeper understanding, in a very personal, subjective, private way, of your own experience."

His videos are short, wordless displays of archetypal dream image, emotions, cycles of time, and phases of life and death, and can be found in major museums worldwide. We have used stills from his videos frequently in the magazine. The three stills shown here (from a video loop of several minutes duration) are from a diptych titled "Surrender," in a twenty-part series called "The Passions." In a November, 2004 interview in the Shambhala Sun, Viola said that after studying with a Zen teacher in Japan, "it began to sink in that perhaps art resided in life itself, that as a practice it derives primarily from the quality of experience, depth of thought, and devotion of the maker." To see his videos, go to www.billviola.com

Lynn Davis

Traveling around the world to photograph natural and man-made monuments and sacred sites, Lynn Davis brings her negatives home and creates monumental black-and-white prints 40 inches square or larger, with subtle tones, often using gold or selenium. We have featured several portfolios of Davis’ work, and profiled her in our January, 2008 issue. Even on the small scale of a magazine page, her photos communicate the majesty, as well as the decay, of sacred sites such as the pyramids of Egypt, Chinese pagodas, and the ruins of Buddhist temples and monuments. Her photographs of natural phenomena such as icebergs, rivers, geysers, and waterfalls have the same stately beauty as the ancient architecture she photographs. A recent body of work is a series in color of both working and abandoned space stations in Florida, Kazakhstan, and French Guiana. Pictured here is "Iceberg #1, Disko Bay, Greenland 1986"; the full range of her work is on display at lynndavisphotography.com

Robert Spellman

Robert Spellman is a painter for whom mindfulness practice is "a central mode of inquiry," and his artistic and Buddhist paths have been continuously intertwined. A student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche since the late 1970s, Spellman was appointed director of a center for solitary meditation retreats in the remote, starkly beautiful Huerfano Valley of southern Colorado. He painted landscapes there and ran the center with his wife, artist Joan Anderson. Later he began teaching at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, serving as head of the visual arts department. His work glows with a humble, masterful exploration of form and color, from what he calls "a lifelong practice of looking, seeing, shaping, and honing." Spellman and Anderson are developing a retreat center for artists in the Huerfano valley on 240 acres of land they have purchased. Called Mountain Water, it will be a place for artists to practice both meditation and visual and verbal arts. Pictured here is "Pippens in a Blue Bowl"; for more, go to www.robertspellman.com.

Michael Newhall

Figures in meditation—the Buddha, monks, Zen students—are the central motif in Michael Newhall’s paintings and sculptures. A Zen priest in the lineage of Kobun Chino Roshi, he is the abbot of Jikoji, a Soto Zen temple and retreat center in Los Gatos, California. Newhall’s work derives directly from his experience as a meditation practitioner. His early figures were cartoons—ink drawings, and watercolor on paper. Later paintings included sumi-ink paintings on rice paper of monks’ heads, and luminous watercolor paintings like the one above. Currently he is making large oil paintings as well as computer-generated artworks. All take as their topic his deepening relationship with Buddhism. His style expresses vividly the excitement of the dharma coming to the West. Pictured here is "Buddhafield #3 Jikoji"; for more, see www.michaelnewhall.com


Chögyam Trungpa photo by Liza Matthews

From the September 2009 issue of the Shambhala Sun.

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