Imagining Consciousness

 

         I paint what exists but is unseeable — the invisible forces that bind and animate life. I use an invented, ever mutating abstract visual vocabulary that includes pattern, repetition, ornamentation, and layering to create complex macro-micro worlds. The paintings contain layers of depth and vibrate with movement, energy, propulsion, conversion, and change. With these paintings I am pursuing my interest in what science calls the hard question of consciousness. My visual speculations about consciousness are imaginatively, metaphorically, and poetically informed by empirical science, philosophy, and ancient wisdom.

 

 

 

The Mandala Series

 

             Sumptuous, intricate, ornamented, Amy Cheng’s Mandala oil paintings are richly referential — they call to mind a range of associations from mandalas, the cosmos, cells, lace, brocade and more. Cheng, born in Taiwan, is a Chinese-American contemporary painter and public art artist who resides and works in New York City. She feels aligned with the long history of geometric and floral ornamentation Far Eastern, Middle Eastern, and European craftsmen have long employed. They did so with the implicit understanding that pattern and repetition, which are endemic in nature, are primal in their rhythmic connection to the human nervous system. Cheng identifies the Mandala series with the long historical tradition of visual artists interested in notions of cosmology. She is, as the artist Thomas Lyon Mills says, painting worlds within worlds with the aim of revealing profound, contemplative, slow truths.