The Golden Light Mudra started as a dance in Big Sur, California in 2016. I don’t recall the dance as it was a pure release of mind into body, following my MFA completion, during the brief and happy spell of living in my minivan in and around San Francisco. As I danced on the canvas on the beach at twilight, I reached for all the blues I had, only blue, all blue, and the purple-ish sand of Big Sur. For six years the painting remained in the blue darkness. In 2022, I decided to revisit the canvas with a renewed vision.
The shape The imperfect circle, cosmic egg, the round river stone - the shape did not occur to me, I did not find or dream it - it was always there, within me and beheld.
My father made a stained glass before I was born, based on the painting Joan Miro made for the Chateau Mounton Rothschild 1969 wine label. This was the year both of my parents arrived in America, from Switzerland and Taiwan. The glass hung in our study facing the south. I was always drawn to the round form of exuberant sun bearing red that seemed to hold Miro’s flying stars, ships and creatures in orbit. I never asked him or myself, what it was, holding it all together, but just accepted it, as a child accepts the eyes of his mother and father, as something elemental and whole.
I made this shape with Turmeric, a material of matrimonial significance and a color that pulses with a grace, hope, and joy that is almost the opposite ( and complement ) of my own blue soul, or perhaps it is the very color of my soul which longs for its other. The canvas was exposed to a storm and then a piece of steel was laid atop to co-oxidize and bloom. The result coincided with a Qi Gong exercise called the Shamanic Cosmic Orbit where a space is created to behold one’s pure inner light. This space is silently contained within the Golden Light Mudra.
