Painting Light, Touching Space: Notes from a Meditative Art Practice

PAINTING LIGHT TOUCHING SPACE

Suzanne Moss PhD

PAINTING LIGHT TOUCHING SPACE

ISBN: 978-0-646-93563-8 Text and all art works by Suzanne Moss Graphic design by Genevieve Swifte at Lx Published by Creativity Matters © Suzanne Moss, 2015 suzannemoss.com dovearts@optusnet.com.au This publication is covered by copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for purposes of review or private research as allowed under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any means without written permission.

Suzanne Moss PhD

Suzanne Moss is a painter, art educator, PhD Graduate and University Medallist in Visual Arts from The Australian National University, Canberra, where she taught for several years. Represented in Australia

by Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney, her artistic practice is concerned with creating luminous, spacious, meditative paintings. Inspired by natural phenomena and philosophical enquiry, Moss’s doctoral research – Painting light, touching space (2006-10) – richly informs her teaching and ongoing practice. The peaceful intent of Moss’s art practice aligns with her work as a teacher of meditative art and personal coach accredited with The Journey®.

Created in memory of beloved champions John Moss, Grant Williamson and Lou Lou Zen Dog Acknowledgements: JOHN & BERNADETTE MOSS, ROSANNA KERWAN, MELISSA MOSS & MAURICE REILLY, GEORGINA BUCKLEY, DEREK O’CONNOR, LOUISE FEATHERSTONE, RIA VLAVIANOS, NICOLA DICKSON, PHILIP PIGGIN, DAVID SEQUEIRA, KABIR MOKAMEL DENISE HIGGINS, GARY SMITH RUTH WALLER & GORDON BULL The Australian National University TED EDWARDS & MARIANNE HORAK The Australian National Insect Collection, CSIRO GENEVIEVE SWIFTE saw this project through from vision to reality with enthusiasm, light-heartedness and skill.

LATROBE REGIONAL GALLERY LIVERPOOL STREET GALLERY, SYDNEY

fig.1 The Tree, 2015

PAINTING LIGHT TO U C H I NG S PA C E

Notes from a meditative art practice

Suzanne Moss

Do you ever feel like the sky?1

Sky-like spaciousness is what I paint about. Natural luminous phenomena inspire the palette and diagrams that translate into compositions of finely painted layers on Belgian linen. Subtle in colour and empty of things, the paintings are best experienced in reality as a kind of looking meditation. Nevertheless, images are supported here with drawings, thoughts and philosophical foundations.

fig.2 Evening bliss (on the way home), 2012

The short title of my doctoral research (2006-10) – Painting light, touching space – continues to describe my practice five years on. Painting light refers to how a painting can appear to generate light, a result of the interplay between some or all of these factors: depicting light; the luminosity generated by materials and methods, and the interaction of actual light. When looking, one’s vision might linger over and traverse the surfaces of paintings, drawn to and touched by the material particulars of painting. Moved to tears on her visit to Mark Rothko’s studio, Jane Dillenberger, relates “I felt as if my eyes had fingertips, moving across the brushed textures of the canvases”. 2 Then, at a certain viewing distance, it is easier to release the gaze from the surface, allowing a visual reach and wandering in pictorial space whether it be deep, shallow or seeming to shift. Inherent in touching space is the tension between looking at the surface and letting it go, seeing in. 3 Painting, for me, is a way of attending to what matters, reclaiming what is made somehow lesser in the busyness of life. Is it possible to contemplate abstract aspects of human experience, such as love and belonging, through abstract painting? The paintings are responses, rather than answers. The creative work of making love visible began by being curious: What might love look like? See blossoms budding, opening and petals falling like snowflakes… a luminous sky and the carefully painted cheeks of angels.

Another question arises: How does one find one’s way? Realise the stars are still present in the daytime sky. While finding ways to draw and paint the essential nature of such is-ness are ongoing, the visual language of mandalas, diagrams and the traditions of painting light, have been pivotal in informing my practice.

I was surprised to discover that love as a theme in visual art is regarded with circumspection. As an example, critic Ann Landi notes that considering the “postmodern stew in which most modern artists find themselves, sentimentality of any sort – and love is a sentiment – seems automatically suspect.” 4 When was love reduced to a trivial sentiment? The signs where there in the late forties when George Orwell predicted an undermining of the meaning of language, love and truth in his novel Nineteen Eighty-four. 5 The bleak totalitarianism of the novel, and actual regimes of the 20th century, demonstrate what happens when the affective realm is not regarded or respected. Thankfully, art remains ‘subjective and concerned with feeling’ notes Art Historian Susan Best, ‘even when artists explicitly reject such qualities and responses’. 6

fig.3 #40 Stars in the daytime sky, 2010

Philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), who coined the expression “Make love, not war”, notes that the suppression of Eros is destructive; that we need to consciously create societies that nurture all aspects of our lives, otherwise we will become less evolved.7 The love that concerned Marcuse was not sentimental, likewise for Krishnamurti:

To be sensitive is to love…. Love gives itself abundantly as a flower gives its perfume…. Love is not sentimentality, nor is it devotion. It is as strong as death. Love cannot be bought through knowledge; and a mind that is pursuing knowledge without love is a mind that deals in ruthlessness and aims merely at efficiency. So the educator must be concerned from the very beginning with this quality of love, which is humility, gentleness, consideration, patience, and courtesy.8

The largesse of creativity and our capacities to be inspired as artist and beholder, teacher and student, are encouraging, uplifting and empowering. Artistic nurturing and realisation of inspired ideas with sensitivity to materials and methods acquired over many years are, in essence, acts of love. A surprising description for some, however, the more studios I visit, the more evidence of intense caring I see and hear. Recently, I met artist Lino Alvarez who, as a student, knew and listened to Marcuse. Lino notes “A true artist creates a work to enrich their own lives and lives of other people.”9 This is easy to forget amidst the daily demands, advertising even on the back of toilet doors and news of horrifying events over which we have little or no agency.10 Alternatively, “[i]maginative response and interpretation”, notes poet Ann Lauterbach, “brings us closer to our sense of connection, our personal agency.” One can’t help but recall the thousands of people who visited art galleries in New York the day after September 11.11 And the words of Judge Antonio Cassese, when asked how he coped with hearing the war crimes in The Hague, Cassese spoke of how he found solace in the Vermeers as often as he possibly could.12 I once painted a war scene, however, like Marcuse, now I say paint love, not war. And so, how might this love – the sensitivity and strength, the listening, patient waiting, caring, the inspired giving quality – how might this look in painted form? The vision that came to mind was of an infinitely emanating, luminous flower, affirmed by Krishnamurti’s words. The qualities I subsequently took to painting.

Writer Bob Nickas’ term “the painter of abstract life” (drawn from Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life”), refers to painters responding to a world that has become more hectic and unstable, by slowing down perception. 13 In this way, the effect of beholding abstract paintings is similar to meditation. Such engagement can be profound, activating the beholder’s awareness of space and light with invitations to experience intellectually, imaginatively, evocatively and/or emotionally. Thus, abstraction can be, as Nickas suggests, an antidote for “the daily flood of images.”14 fig.4 Lotus mandala drawing 2007

Since its inception, abstraction and meditation have been linked. The Suprematists’ abstract paintings aspired toward a higher plane of awareness achieved through meditation. 15 Kazimir Malevich and Mikhail Matiushin were greatly influenced by the discipline of Vedanta Yoga and linked colour phenomena with the ineffable. 16 Matiushin’s experimentation with extremely faint shades of colour provides a strong historical context for my work. It was his view that “[s]ubtle, barely observable changes in phenomena as fundamental as color, sound, and form give evidence of the unseen world, accessible through meditation but of which we are normally unaware.” 17 Almost five hundred years earlier, also founded in a practice of contemplation, 18 “Fra Angelico scaled down his colors to their faintest values, taking advantage of the soft white ground of fresco to create an evenly flowing, unnaturally pale light....

He conjures a space that knows no limits and yet flows tangibly before one’s eyes.” 19 The subtle colours of my paintings are, in part, inspired by Fra Angelico’s fresco cycle of San Marco Museum, Florence. The luminous effects appear more strongly with sustained viewing, but for the speedy viewer some of them remain ‘white on white’. Malevich, the first to make such a painting, is said to provoke the viewer to look more closely. 20 Certainly for Malevich, full engagement with the work was required to reach a meditative state. 21 He had the same intent for his paintings as a yogi-artist has for mandalas. Historian Naomi Smolik notes it was the mid 20th Century theoreticians of formalism “that failed to grasp the mystic origins of abstract painting but also the simple fact that the notion of a pure form is an ancient mystical idea with religious background.” 22 Circles, squares and triangles have been employed in mandalas and diagrams for many hundreds of years, as has the grid, long before appearing in Western art.

The grid structure is one of the late-modernist principles of Op that also applies to my compositions, along with the lack of distinction between figure and ground. 23 Once seen at a viewing distance where details coalesce, the painted surfaces appear to be in a process of dissolving into or hovering above the picture plane – a very quiet version of the kind of optical effects created by Bridget Riley.

These qualities point to the contemporary context for my painting practice in the work of Riley, Oliver Marsden, and Wilma Tabacco; in Virginia Coventry’s luminous constructs; Robert Hunter’s high-key symmetries; Rosslynd Piggott’s Zen-like fields; Howard Taylor’s distillations of natural phenomena, Brian Blanchflower’s Canopy paintings and Mark Grotjahn’s geometric Butterfly paintings, “meditational for the viewer in the moment, as well as for the artist in the act of painting.” 24

fig.5 #31 Rose, 2009

The eighty-eight artists in the exhibition The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama “seek to create zones of peace, and are intended to inspire others to generate compassion, love and patience.” 25 If more of us could spend a few minutes each day cultivating inner peace, the Dalai Lama believes we can generate personal and social transformation. 26 Making and being with meditative art are easy ways to do this. International teacher Mochita Har-Lev notes Meditative Art is a tool to bring one to the present moment, a practice of awareness, attentiveness and peacefulness; a way to connect to our true self; not to analyse our dark side but as a way of driving inwards to the source of creativity – we learn to quiet ourselves, listen and let creativity flow though us. 27 Through teaching drawing and painting approaches to meditative art, I have found that hands-on engagement with art materials, transforming them with accessible and rewarding approaches is replenishing for those who need to be innovative, surprisingly fulfilling for those who think they can’t, and calming for those who worry too much.

fig.6 Suzanne painting ‘Between the rain’ fig.7 #32 Between the rain (homage to Agnes Martin), 2009-10

Often I’ve recalled Agnes Martin’s suggestion to “look between the rain.” 28 Instantly one’s gaze softens and reaches forward. Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Josef Albers and Ad Reinhardt have informed my approaches to composition. Josef Albers once said “that is what I want to do: to make twentieth-century meditational images.” 29 Where Albers’ shapes appear to sink, however, mine aim to float, evoking a gentle sense of compression and expansion akin to breathing. Agnes Martin also understood that geometry could be used in the service of contemplation. 30 While her humble means convey luminous spaciousness, Martin’s oeuvre affirms for me that painting can be a meditation. “The paintings are meditations on innocence, beauty, happiness and love.” Explains Arne Glimcher “Agnes’s painting invites the viewer to recognize states of perfection already extant within ourselves. There is no narrative, they offer no explanation, and they make no demands.” 31 What a relief.

Agnes Martin attended the lectures on Zen given by D.T. Suzuki at Colombia University (1949-1951) where the professor taught that awareness of one’s state of mind and “cultivating emptiness” through meditation enhanced creativity. 32 Martin herself wrote of the empty mind, waiting for inspiration. 33 The many artists Suzuki inspired carry his message, notes Mark Epstein, recalling the essential teachings: question yourself instead of settling into complacency; open up instead of closing around what you already know and embarrass your self rather than caring about what others think. 34 And so, I keep asking What might love look like? When Socrates enquired if he could represent the “disposition of the soul”, Parrhasius asked how such an invisible thing could be represented. 35 Relating this story, Joseph Marioni notes “the look can be represented in shapes and colours because it appears in our visual experience.” 36 The ‘look’ of restfulness for the eyes and gentleness on the spirit can be experienced looking into the spaces between the rain as when beholding an Agnes Martin painting. Two mantras come together here: Love looks like between the rain.

Shunyata, a Buddhist term meaning emptiness, is embodied in Agnes Martin’s paintings as it is in the limitless atmospheric space of fifteenth Century Ch’an (Zen) paintings where mountainous landscapes appear to dematerialise into the distance. 37 Shunyata is one of the qualities of the awakened heart – bodhichitta – described by teacher Pema Chödrön from the Mahayana School’s lojong teachings: “ (1) it is soft and gentle, which is compassion; (2) it is clear and sharp, which is called prajna, and (3) it is open…. called shunyata.” 38 Emptiness sounds cold, but Chödrön explains shunyata is pervaded with the warmth of compassion. 39 Attending to the spaciousness, one can experience shunyata: in the space between Mary and the Archangel in Fra Angelico’s Cell 3 Annunciation at San Marco Museum, Florence; in the late works of J.M.W. Turner; the paintings of Rothko and those of Agnes Martin, her series titled The Islands aptly described as “the paradox of emptiness filled”. 40 fig.8 Looks like love, 2011

Research opportunities to be with these masterpieces allowed me to properly behold them: to move forward and back in the manner of both painter and beholder, noticing what could be perceived with varied viewing distances and more time; the spatial and luminous effects and rhythms; the effect of relations of scale to one’s own body and to the room; the light revealing paintings’ materials and textures; the actual colours and the artist’s movements as marks embedded over time. All about being in the world, the more time given over to these multi-sensual experiences, the more we might curiously come to know ourselves beyond the usual ways of thinking. It is worth spending time looking at real paintings with empathy. Imagine stepping into the artist’s shoes, slowing down, going beyond like/don’t like statements. * I’ve heard it said that if you cannot measure it, it isn’t real; it doesn’t exist. Most of us know grief is terribly real and overwhelming in scale although it cannot be measured. Or can it? Henryk Górecki notates grief in his Symphony No. 3’s Lento e Largo. Anna Akhmatova becomes the immensity of the territory: You and I are a mountain of grief.

You and I will never meet on this earth.

If only you could send me at midnight A greeting through the stars. 41

Poetic approaches to conveying such powerful realities are necessarily different to conventional measuring systems. Resulting works of art can remind us of our shared humanity, from the most wonderful to the abjectly horrible, sometimes in one painting, sculpture, poem or symphony. Despite bewilderment at frequent discordance between the ideals of a rationalist culture and their artistic purpose, artists communicate the imperative of what they do by making what they must. 42 Thus, part of my affirming process of making real, is to make measured drawings: intervals of the poetic; maps of the unseen; grids of emptiness and logs of the illogical.

fig.9 Heart of the mountain shrouded in heavy light, 2012

After the sudden death of my partner, for many months I worked late into the night painting intervals of soft colours – lullabies – for me to sleep and for him to rest. Moths kept me company. I began to write to him Dear Moth… and soon found this passage from the poem “Like light over this plane” by Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273): ‘A moth flying into the flames says with its wingfire, try this...’ 43 Go to what you are most drawn to. Moths under a microscope revealed astonishingly beautiful structured iridescences, and eventually the Moth, Lightness of flight and Flame paintings came to be. 44 fig.10 White moth, 2012 fig.11 Moth/Flame VI, 2013

fig.12 previous page: Looks like love, detail, 2012-13 figs.13-20 Flames 1-8, 2014

Can painting speak of the lightness or heaviness of the heart? Underneath the enquiry is longing, and longing can be a kind of prayer. 45 Intention unfolds into form through desiring, seeing and making.

Muriel Rukeyser conveys this through her poem ‘Waking this Morning’:

I want strong peace and delight…I want to make my touch poems: to find my morning, to find you entire alive moving among the anti-touch people… 46

Oh yes, that. Akhmatova’s and Rukeyser’s poems resonate and persist, supportively. A moment of relief ensues; the heart-felt has been conveyed and I am here feeling this too somehow altered by a connection to the artist through their work, aware of being alive, of breathing.

The Many breaths series of paintings attend to the repetitive pattern and interconnected nature of breathing. One being’s breath cycle follows one after another until the very last breath, and the accumulation of all those breaths forms an undercurrent sustaining life. Every living thing breathes. All the people and animals are supported by the respiration of Earth’s plant world. The oxygen for one human breath in five comes from the Amazonian rainforests – the ‘lungs’ of the earth 47 – and grand breath-like atmospheric movements wrap the world in weather.

Patterns of breath endure, from the mythical world tree Yggdrasil to the humble Casuarinas 48 breathing beside the Murrumbidgee River. Shells seem to breathe with the sound of the sea. Moths breathe for a short time. I breathed the sea air looking westward many, many times. Perhaps the air was salt-laden from drifting where the ocean meets the sky, or in a cloud way up in the silvery atmosphere. Inspiration from nature becomes paintings.

fig.21 The weight of light, 2014, acrylic, colour pencil on Belgian linen.

Metta (Pali for loving kindness) was inspired by sharing tea from a thermos with a dear friend under a magnificent tree one perfect afternoon. Sunlight flickered gently across thousands of leaves. There was a sense of timeless ease. This receptive state of ‘being with’, Gaston Bachelard describes as intimate immensity where boundaries between one’s mind and what is usually ‘out there’, seem to fall away and the spaces of intimacy and the world merge through their immensity. 49 In moments like these, worries fall away. There is a sense of luminous spaciousness. One can see what love looks like. Painting a colour beside another, each colour changes. Fields of painted colours empty of things arrive at the moment of seeing.

figs.22 Many breaths V (detail), 2015 fig.23 #33 Metta, 2010

I am painting the sound of Casuarinas...

I am near my father, strong and agile, looking up into a Casuarina.

We are standing on the river’s bank – the Murrumbidgee.

Glancing back at me with a half-smile, his eyes sing.

I see the singing of sunlight on the water... hear the shhhhhhheee-sounds of Casuarinas in the breeze This moment he gives me: My father’s voice of sunlit river and caressed trees is saying my name. 50

fig.24 The sound of Casuarinas, work in progress, 2015

LIST OF WORKS All paintings by Suzanne Moss Front Cover: Flame 3 (series 2), 2014, acrylic, colour pencil on Belgian linen, 61 x 61cm. Photograph courtesy of Genevieve Swifte.

Back Cover: Drawing from visual diary, 2013, pencil on paper, 20 x 20cm. Photograph courtesy of Genevieve Swifte.

Title page: Studio detail, 2015. Photograph courtesy of Genevieve Swifte. fig.1 The Tree, 2015, acrylic, colour pencil on Belgian linen, 90 x 90cm. Photograph courtesy of Genevieve Swifte.

fig.24 The sound of Casuarinas, 2015 (work in progress) colour pencil, acrylic on canvas, 182 x 242cm.

Photograph courtesy of Genevieve Swifte. fig.25 Suzanne in her studio with Many breaths V, 2015, acrylic, colour pencil and oil on Belgian linen, 90 x 90 cm.

Photograph courtesy of Genevieve Swifte.

fig.2 Evening bliss (on the way home), 2012, acrylic and colour pencil on Belgian linen, 116 x 116cm.

Photograph courtesy of Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney. fig.3 #40 Stars in the daytime sky, 2010, acrylic, colour pencil and oil on Belgian linen, 116 x 116cm. Collection of the artist.

Photograph courtesy of Rob Little RLDI. NOTES fig.4 Lotus mandala, 2007, graphite pencil on graph paper, 30 x 30cm. Collection of the artist.

Photograph courtesy of Genevieve Swifte.

1 Suzanne Moss, visual diary entry, 2008.

fig.5 #31 Rose, 2009 acrylic, colour pencil and oil on Belgian linen, 150x150cm. Private Collection.

Photograph courtesy of Rob Little RLDI.

2 Jane Dillenberger cited by James Elkins, in Pictures and Tears. A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings,

fig.6 Suzanne painting Between the rain, 2010, Photograph courtesy of The Australian National University.

3 “seeing-in” was a term coined by Richard Wollheim, “What the Spectator Sees,” in Visual Theory, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 104.

ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2001), 3.

fig.7 #32 Between the rain (homage to Agnes Martin), 2009-10, acrylic and colour pencil on Belgian linen, 150x150cm.

Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Rob Little RLDI.

4 Ann Landi, “Kiss and Tell,” Artnews 94, no. 2 (1995): 116.

fig.8 Looks like love, 2011, colour pencil on paper, 12 x 12cm. Photograph courtesy of Rob Little RLDI.

5 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Penguin Books, 1949).

fig.9 Heart of the mountain shrouded in heavy light, 2012, acrylic, colour pencil on Belgian linen, 116 x 116cm. Private Collection.

Photograph courtesy of Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney.

6 Susan Best, Visualising Feeling. Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde (London: I.B.Taurus & Co., 2014), 1.

fig.10 White moth, 2012, colour pencil on paper, 15 x 15cm. Collection of the artist. Photograph courtesy of Rob Little RLDI. fig.11 Moth/Flame VI, 2013, acrylic, colour pencil on Belgian linen, 150 x 150 cm.

Photograph courtesy of Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney. fig.12 Looks like love, 2012, acrylic, colour pencil on Belgian linen, 90 x 120cm Photographs courtesy of Genevieve Swifte. figs.13-20 Flame 1-8 (series 2), 2014, acrylic, colour pencil on Belgian linen, 61 x 61cm. Photographs courtesy of Genevieve Swifte. fig.21 The weight of light, 2014, acrylic, colour pencil on Belgian linen, 90 x 90cm. Photograph courtesy of Genevieve Swifte. fig.22 Many breaths V, 2015 (detail) acrylic, colour penciland oil on Belgian linen, 90 x 90cm. Collection of the artist.

Photograph courtesy of Genevieve Swifte. fig.23 #33 Metta, 2010, acrylic, colour pencil and oil on Belgian linen, 150 x 150cm. Private Collection.

Photograph courtesy of Rob Little RLDI.

7 Herbert Marcuse cited by Christopher Phillips, Socrates in Love. Philosophy for a Passionate Heart (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), 50.

8 Jiddu Krishnamurti, Life Ahead. On Learning and the Search for Meaning (Novato, California: New World Library, 1963), 10-11.

9 Lino Alvarez, cited by Peter Adams, Ore What! A portrait of the people of Hill End. (Lettuce Spray Productions, Katoomba, 2010).

10 Ann Lauterbach, The Night Sky. Writings on the Poetics of Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 247.

11 Michael Kimmelman cited by Drusilla Modjeska, Timepieces (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2002), 214.

12 Lawrence Weschler, ‘Inventing peace: What can Vermeer teach us about Bosnia? A three-hundred-year-old lesson about fashioning order in a world of chaos’. The New Yorker, Nov 20, 1996 cited from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ karadzic/genocide/inventing.html 13 Bob Nickas, Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (London: Phaidon, 2009), 7.

14 ibid 15 Charlotte Douglas, “Beyond Reason: Malevich, Matiushin, and Their Circles,” in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985,

33 Barbara Haskell, “Agnes Martin: The Awareness of Perfection,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Barbara Haskell (New York: Harry N. Abrams,

1993), 107.

ed. Edward Weisberger (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), 186-7. Ibid., 188.

34 Ibid., 55.

16 Douglas, “Beyond Reason: Malevich, Matiushin, and Their Circles,”186-7.

35 Joseph Marioni, “Socrates and the Alligator,” in Abstract Painting between Analysis and Synthesis, ed. Elisabeth Madlener

17 ibid, 197.

18 Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: The University of Chicago

(Vienna: Ritter-Klagenfurt, 1992), 74.

36 Ibid.

Press, 1995), 24. *Regarding his painting practice, Didi-Huberman notes that Fra Angelico would have been devoted to the theology of Thomas Aquinas and thus practiced contemplatio, a contemplative discipline where one aims to see God in oneself.

37 Hal Foster, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1988),

19 Dore Ashton, “Rothko’s Frame of Mind” in Glenn Phillips and Thomas Crow (Eds.), Seeing Rothko, (London: Tate Publishing,

38 Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are (London: Element, 2005), xi.

2005), 21.

20 Joe Houston, Optic Nerve Perceptual Art of the 1960’s, (New York: Merrell Publishers in association with Colombus Museum of

101-2.

39 Ibid., 11.

Art, 2007), 101.

40 Heinz Liesbrock, Agnes Martin: The Islands (Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2004), 42.

21 Douglas, “Beyond Reason: Malevich, Matiushin, and Their Circles,” 186-87.

41 Anna Akhmatova cited by John Berger, “The Hour of Poetry,” in Selected Essays John Berger, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Vintage,

22 Naomi Smolik, “Self-Alienated Abstraction,” in Abstract Painting between Analysis and Synthesis, ed. Elisabeth Madlener (Vienna:

2001), 451.

Ritter Klagenfurt, 1992), 60.

42 By artists I mean the substantial number of artists I know either personally or through my research.

23 Frances Follin, Embodied Visions Bridget Riley, Op Art and the Sixties (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 23.

43 Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi translated by Coleman Barks, Rumi The Book of Love. (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).

24 Bob Nickas, Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting, 126.

44 I was a guest artist at CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection, Black Mountain, Canberra, during 2012 and 2013

25 H.H. The Dalai Lama, “Preface,” in The Missing Peace. Artists and the Dalai Lama, ed. Committee of 100 for Tibet & The Dalai

Lama Foundation (San Rafael, California: Earth Aware, 2006), vii.

26 Ibid.

27 http://meditativeartschool.com cited 15.1.15.

28 Agnes Martin, “The Untroubled Mind,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Barbara Haskell (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973), 18.

29 Friedhelm Mennekes, “Interconnection: Religion and Art,,” in Beyond Belief. Modern Art and the Religious Imagination,

ed. Rosemary Crumlin (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998), 27.

30 Barbara Haskell, “Agnes Martin: The Awareness of Perfection,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Barbara Haskell (New York: Harry N. Abrams,

1993), 102.

31 Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Rememberings. (New York: Phaidon, 2012),11.

32 Mark Epstein, “Meditation as Art: Art as Meditation,” in On the Being of Being an Artist, ed. Mary Jane Jacob (Chicago: School of

the Art Institute of Chicago, 2006), 53.

culminating in the exhibition ‘Dear Moth…’ with Denise Higgins.

45 Oriah Mountain Dreamer, Your Heart’s Prayer: following the Thread of Desire into a Deeper Life (2 CD’s). Boulder, Colorado:

Sounds True, 2002.

46 Muriel Rukeyser, “Waking this Morning” in Beatrix Gates (Ed.), The Wild Good. New York: Doubleday, 1996, 251-2.

47 http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/amazon.htm cited 4.2.15.

48 Casuarina cunninghamiana is a tree native to Australia also known as the Shee-Oak beacause of the sound of the wind passing

through it’s branches.

49 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 203.

50 Suzanne Moss, journal entry, 2015 .

fig.25 Suzanne in her studio with Many breaths V, 2015

Suzanne is an excellent example of a contemporary artist consciously engaging the specific integration of material, optical and bodily experiences involved in the making and viewing of paintings. She works with an extremely high-key palette and subtle material shifts testing the threshold of visibility, generating subtle optical/spatial sensations. Her commitment to her practice is deep and sustained, and her engagement with the issues of contemporary painting highly sophisticated and nuanced, both intensely sensual and intellectually rigorous.

Ruth Waller, Head of Painting, The Australian National University School of Art

The exhibition (Painting light, touching space) was a very clear demonstration of a sustained visual investigation that also showed profound understanding of sources and an acute visual intelligence. The paintings were at once subtle, mesmerizing, dazzling and volatile. The exhibition is worthy of special commendation as an outstanding achievement.

Dr Susan Best, Author and Art Historian, Griffith University, Australia

Paintings by Suzanne Moss have a beguiling presence without the ‘about’ or ‘of’ subject matter, and this is their paradoxical countenance.

Derek O’Connor, Painter

When I look at Suzanne Moss’s paintings, they strike me as sublime. They embody an exquisite balance between perfect stillness while being in constant motion...They realise a state of meditation.

She achieves this purely with paint, tone and colour – Light.

John Forrester Clack, Artist and Art Educator

Your paintings are so subtly powerful… they feel like falling into grace, to open with them…subtle, and sublimely in-drawing…

Kevin Billett, CEO The Journey® and Conscious Company, Wales, UK