|
"Nature, especially natural phenomena such as the infinitely changing aspects of water and light in waves, clouds, the sky - these are the subjects I like to paint..... When painting, I find my feelings and perceptions fit in well with the strong Buddhist beliefs I have had since young. Constant change, impermanence and non-self, the overall scheme of thing where everything has its place and yet relates and interacts with all other things. These are what I try to depict in my paintings", Prabhakara stated in 1990. By then he had become a devout Buddhist, spending part of each year meditating in a forest retreat. After his exhibition in 1987, he had visited India, Nepal and Kashmir in order to make a pilgrimage to the four sacred Buddhist sites - the places of his birth, enlightenment, first discourse and death. Besides panoramic landscapes of even greater breadth and grandeur, this had resulted in a series of abstract paintings composed of irregular rectangles, like paving stones, in colors borrowed from ancient Indian temples and traditional textiles.
On his return from India, Prabhakara spent ten days at Santisukharama, a Buddhist Meditation Center in Kota Tinggi, Malaysia, practicing the art of meditation under the guidance of the Venerable Sujiva. The Buddhist idea of enlightenment and preoccupied him since the early 1980's. Reading extensively the publications on Buddhism by such scholars and teachers as Jack Kornfield, Sayadaw U Pandita and the Venerable U Silananda, he found himself thinking of imagery as a metaphor like language, able to explain a concept. In 1988 he began a series of paintings dealing not so much with moving figures as with movement itself, such as Impression, 1988 (Collection: Singapore Art Museum). This tendency culminates in Dance of Change, 1992, in which concrete subject matter is absent. Resembling diaphanous veils or smoke wafting in the wind, gentle ripples of water or the blurred images of moving figures caught in photographs, these paintings with their flowing patterns and tonal colors are the artist's visual interpretations of the Buddhist law of impermanence and change ability.
"You see impermanence in everything. And with this understanding, I feel I can do better paintings...... sometimes I might be satisfied with something I have done. Later, when I look at it again, I might feel like changing certain things. I dare to do it because everything is subject to change. There's always a lot of unlimited creative energy", Prabhakara stated, explaining his desire to paint pictures that could express the liberation that results from the loss of ego, the ridding of an exclusive identity or self, to be replaced by the sense of interrelation and interdependence. Through there paintings he hopes to gain an insight into the meaning of his own existence and to demonstrate his acceptance of things they are. For he realizes that the striving for enlightenment is in itself a paradox because it is this desire and this striving that he should be rid of. His idea of these "insights" is embodied in the Trees series, inspired by the rubber plantations surrounding the Buddhist retreat in Kota Tinggi. The idea of painting trees came to him in 1987 but was not executed until 1991. Early works, such as Quiet Plantation, 1991, are relatively realistically conceived, but by the following year he had progressed to a more abstract approach, as in Mystic Memory, 1992, in which
|
|
