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calligraphy makes its first appearance, albeit in pretend form. His intention was to paint the essence of the trees, their sound and feel rather than their physical reality. The artist, alone in the forest, becomes aware only of nature's beauty and its unpredictability, hearing the sounds and feeling the emotions, which cannot be heard or felt in the city. These paintings pay homage to Cezanne and Picasso but are essentially about the fundamentals of people's relationship with nature, about a state of mind.
Abstraction is taken a step forward in May You Be Well and Happy I, 1996, by the addition of the Buddhist injunction "May you be well and happy", in Chinese and English, over and over again on the painting. This has the effect of bringing the pattern of trees right on the picture surface, flattening them even further. In Going for Retreat II, 1997, similar inscriptions, combined with graffiti-like drawings of Buddha images and other symbols, are scrawled over almost the entire painting. Explaining his intentions, Prabhakara states, " I practice Vipassana whereby on e becomes acutely aware of one's body movements, feelings and thoughts. When one listens, one is also aware of listening. This applies to everything one does. It is a process of knowing the cause and effect of all phenomena. That is how wisdom and understanding is achieved. Concentration gives one peace and a calm mind. Steadfast mindfulness leads to the purification of the mind, enabling one to overcome worries and pain. This is Buddha's teaching, and painting is my way of sharing this experience."
In the early 1990s, paintings containing obvious landscape references gradually gave way to those with more symbolic imagery, such as the Games series. Like the Trees series, this is meant as a metaphor for the process of losing one's ego, when the mind becomes void of all thoughts, all desires. Begun in 1994 and based on horizontal and vertical lines, the symbols of tabulated good order, these pictures of chessboards, and other gameboards are given personal meaning and an atmosphere or some kind of mood. "Games, like Chinese chess, snake and ladders and tic-tac-toe, are linked with childhood memories... Life is like a game. Whether you go up or down, win or lose, is all due to many circumstances. What is important is to "play" with mindfulness, to look beyond the winning and the losing, to enjoy each step. Suddenly the game is over and you begin all over again."
In Chessboard: Missing Square, 1994, Prabhakara pares down the elements of his picture making to squares in atmospheric blues and greys. He has a special way of coming simplicity of style and subject matter with subtlety of perception to convey a sense of unchanging time, inevitability or eternity. Whereas Snakes and Ladders, 1994, is an almost literal visual translation of that well-known gameboard, Game of Satipatthana, begun in 1994 and completed in 1997, adopts a more abstractionist approach to content of an obscure and personal nature. Signs and symbols intermingle with the snakes and ladders, altering their meaning, function and symbolic value.
The Wisdom series runs concurrently with the Games series to which it is closely related, compositionally and conceptually.
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