About the 1008 Paintings Project

The paintings in progress...

What inspired this series of paintings?

1008 Meditations on the Human Condition: The Evolution of an Idea

Each painting in this series takes as it’s title some kind of disorder or behavioral, psychological or physical condition that I’ve culled from medical encyclopedias and dictionaries from the 1960s.

Various definitions culled from old medical encyclopedias

As I looked through these encyclopedias, it was sobering to grasp just how delicate the balance of the human organism is, and yet how miraculously most of us are almost perfectly healthy. But there is so much that can go awry, from either nature or nurture, and then how do we deal with it, or attempt to heal it?

Initially, I started painting right into the encyclopedias, as a daily meditation and creative practice experiment. I thought that this practice would be a kind of solo meditation retreat for myself, that I could do from the comfort of my own workspace in the heart of Los Angeles, where I was living at the time.

For more than two decades now, I have found that a more or less daily meditation practice is something that keeps me healthy in body, mind and spirit. For an even longer time, since I was a teenager, I’ve maintained an almost daily writing practice, that I’ve done in sketchbooks with ample drawing and painting.

This was not something I considered art, more just as a sketchbook of ideas and feelings where I could let anything happen. They were my journals, so I was, and still am, intensely private about their contents.

Many years later I would start referring to these books as visual journals, but at the time, I didn’t have a name for them, nor did I know anyone else with this strange habit of documenting their world. But it helped me make sense of things, so I kept working in this way. It became my therapy, my lifelong creative practice, and the basis of my work with others.

In Los Angeles, I was looking to cultivate a strong creative practice to get into painting again, something I had stopped doing about eight years prior. So I thought I’d do a painting a day in this set of encyclopedias about human behavior, after my morning meditation, and that would be my practice.

Beginning sketches in the kitchen of my L.A. apartment. Note: you don't need a fancy studio to work. I began this project with only 2 square feet of counter space to work on. But don't do what I do and eat while painting. Not a good mix: paint and food.

After just a few days of painting this way, the project evolved into something else entirely. Still thinking of the paintings as a personal sketchbook, I started painting on scraps of cardboard from the recycling bin of my apartment building, because I wanted to have the paintings out in the studio, not closed up in a book.

After doing about a dozen paintings, the idea of the 1008 Meditations on the Human Condition came into focus, and that’s where the project is to date.

Well….I did want to start painting again. That was the intention of the creative practice to begin with.

What is the figure? Are those Buddhas?

I think people should see what they want to see in these pieces. For some, they see a Buddha.

In the Buddhist tradition, we talk about developing our Buddha nature. This is done, in large part, through the practice of meditation. Meditation is an act of observing the mind and body without judgment, without interpretation. The meditator is literally sitting there, watching the mind. Breathing, and coming back to the present moment. Simple, not easy. Especially after five minutes or 30 minutes or five or ten days.

"Anxiety Hysteria" detail from 1008 Paintings Project.

So, for me, these figures represent the person sitting with what is: the ups and downs of life, the myriad human conditions that affect us all, directly or indirectly at one time or another. They also represent the Buddha nature of the meditator.

At large meditation retreats, I am always struck by the sight of hundreds of people sitting together. Each person sitting with all of their thoughts and memories and aches and pains and not leaving the room. Simply sitting with what is: simple, yet not so easy.

Whether a person meditates or not, we are all sitting with so much going on inside of us. Not literally sitting in meditation, but going about life with all of these thoughts and feelings and problems and challenges and joys and sorrows that no one else can see.

Everyone has these worlds within them, these human conditions and struggles, these breakthroughs and joys. But we don’t talk about it much, and it doesn’t really show in the outer world. I have always been fascinated with the interior life of us humans, and all of the unseen forces that shape us into who we are.

What are the paintings made of?

Recycled materials form the basis of this project. I’m painting on found pieces of cardboard, cut to size. The paintings are painted on top of my mixed media collages, made from old human behavior textbooks and encyclopedias and paper that I paint in my studio then tear up for collage.

Why 1008 Paintings?

When I was designing this creative challenge for myself, I wanted it to feel sort of like a marathon, or a long meditation retreat, which is equally arduous, but in a different way.

So, 100 paintings didn’t feel like enough of a marathon for me. 1,000 paintings felt much more like a marathon, in the mildly impossible category for me (considering I’m also doing a bunch of other stuff).

When I got up to 1,000, it was a natural step to round up to 1,008, which is a sacred number in many spiritual and mystical traditions, especially in Buddhism. The number 1008 represents the infinite, and is said to contain the dimensions of the universe. I’m not a scholar on these things, but the number 1008 just felt right as I sat with it.

My Psychological and Spiritual Training: The Short Version Minus the Gory Details (because the gory details make it a much longer story)

At the same time I was studying to become a psychotherapist, I was also practicing meditation and exploring various spiritual paths, including Buddhist, Christian, Sufi, Sikh and various indigenous traditions that seemed to keep finding me.

By the time I was working as a therapist in an in-patient psych hospital, I was already thinking that therapy was missing something, but I didn’t know how to articulate it.

All I knew was: I had already consumed lot’s of therapy, and I didn’t think it really helped me.

This realization that bothered me a lot, especially since I had just spent six years of my life and about a hundred thousand dollars getting the credentials to be a therapist. Uh oh.

"Automatic Writing" detail view, from the 1008 Paintings Project

What did help me was writing, making art and practicing meditation. So this is what I started doing with my patients.

Eventually, I quit working at the psych hospital because it occurred to me that all I really wanted to do was make art, and work with people who were willing to confront their issues without being locked up.

Also, the medical model of in-patient psychotherapy, driven and controlled by insurance companies, was not something that I observed was particularly healing, or even ethical, at times.

It took me about 10 more years to articulate, at least to myself, what I felt was missing with therapy: it was focused on what was wrong, it continually looked toward the past, and asked a lot of why questions which, even if you could answer why you did something or acted a certain way, didn’t really help you change or heal.

Plus, I was always bothered by the fact that psychotherapy was a very young “science” that was made up by a few pretty dysfunctional western white guys. Surely, their views and methods must be biased by that alone. Where was the female perspective? The indigenous perspective? The non-European, middle-class perspective? What about all of the wealth of healing traditions from the far corners of the world, going back for thousands of years?

Conversely, meditation practice looks at what is right with you, starting with where you are right now, focuses in the present moment and makes room for paradox and inquiry.

In these explorations, I found there is more than one answer for our questions, and our problems are not just interpreted as something pathological, but as an intelligent reaction to something that really was amiss. These ancient philosophies and traditions show us a bigger picture of our identity, as spiritual beings, and not just defined by our personalities, our ego identities or even physical bodies.

The more I studied various spiritual paths, I noticed that at root, they all agreed on key important points, even as they used different language, terms or deities to express them differently. The teachings and practices went back for millennia, and again, there were certain commonalities that existed cross-culturally, including using the arts for healing. These factors kept me exploring and applying what I was learning to my own healing process.

This is all still a huge exploration for me. The more I “learn” and study, the more questions I have, really. This 1008 Paintings Project is opening up whole new worlds for me, while at the same time, bringing together the seeming divergent paths that have so shaped my own creative work, and the work I do with others.

Typical view of my work table. A strong cup of green tea + painting = bliss.

Related posts:

1. Autoerotism: 1008 Paintings Project
2. Disorientation: 1008 Paintings Project Update #4
3. Painting #1: Anxiety (from 1008 Paintings Project)
4. How Living in Mexico is Like Zen Practice: 1008 Paintings Project Update #6
5. 1008 Paintings Project Update #2