I’m making more small (4″ x 6″) Tantra Homage paintings. Tantra is an ancient Hindu tradition of beliefs and practices that seeks to channel the divine energy of the cosmos into the human microcosm. A couple of years ago I found a beautiful book about it, Tantra Song. Inside were curiously modern looking paintings of great simplicity. The artists were anonymous but came from a tradition in which painting was a kind of meditation in which the artist might connect with something sublime and make it manifest. And so I took to trying.

I don’t pre-plan, just show up. I work slowly and in silence, like a meditation. In the original Tantra paintings there’s always a focal point, some sense of time in the weathered paper, of accident and purpose, of the artist’s hand. There’s Yin and Yang—expansion and contraction, dark and light. There’s harmony and strength too. I’m not an 18th century Indian mystic. I’m looking for my own way, for jazziness and stillness. For that great connection.

I think of Sonia Delaunay, Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and others. Of the energy in their work, different for each. I never know what will show up to meet me when I sit down to make these paintings so I just keep at it until I feel happy something has. Then I go on to other quite different work.