Imagining Consciousness

 

          I paint what exists but is unseeable — the invisible forces that bind and animate life. My recent work explores consciousness itself: awareness as a living presence that flows through all things.

          Science is beginning to confirm what ancient traditions have long intuited — that consciousness is not confined to the human mind. Trees communicate through vast underground networks, exchanging nutrients, water, and warnings across miles of forest. Under drought conditions “mother trees” recognize and sustain their kin preferentially. Even at the microscopic scale, an enzyme, such as a protein, can sense its surroundings, seeking safety when conditions turn hostile.

          Western thought often locates consciousness within the brain, but Ayurvedic philosophy envisions it as part of the fabric of the Universe — something we tune into, rather than create. Through meditation, they believe, the mind becomes still enough to feel that greater awareness moving through us.

          In my paintings, flower-like forms embody this idea. Their vitality, radiance, and continual unfolding mirror the qualities of consciousness — buoyant, luminous, alive. Each bloom exists within an energetic field, suggesting that awareness pervades both the immense and the infinitesimal, the macro and the micro, the cosmic and the cellular. My work is an attempt to give form to that invisible field — to make the unseen visible.

 

 

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.