Sacred syllable breathes life into art
Bill Goers is a modest and talented painter. Subtle and profound, his paintings are informed by his practice of Buddhist meditation. That said, people of all ages and backgrounds are engaged by them.
What Goers — whose last show was 35 years ago — has to say is as simple as can be. The basis of much of what is on display here is just one syllable, SA, the Sanskrit seed syllable of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.
It’s a small idea, but the notion of compassion has great breadth. A few years ago, Goers, who is basically an abstract painter, decided to “do something literate” and chose this written symbol as the focus of his practice. Taking a Chinese brush in hand, whenever he had a spare moment, he wrote the syllable — 30 or 100 or 1,000 times. Eventually, he felt comfortable with it.
A friend encouraged him to try something “tactile,” so he cut some of his inscriptions into strips. These he gathered into bunches, like the pompoms cheerleaders use. As the breeze blew the strands, the seed syllable seemed to be activated by the dynamic of life passing by. The effect was not unlike the prayer flags that festoon sacred sites in Tibet.
Eventually, larger sheets of the sacred syllable were inscribed and sliced into strips. In the gallery, they hang like curtains, gently rustling with every passing draft, and the brushstrokes combine and part with an engaging randomness.
These are interactive sculptures of extraordinary efficiency. They have no moving parts but are in constant motion. I mentioned that they reminded me of beaded door curtains. “They keep the flies out,” Goers laughed. “How mundane. But if it’s a statement of compassion, then it is as mundane as can be — or exalted.”
With a friend, he took the “sliced-up prayer flags” to Uplands Park, and there, among the Garry oaks, they made a video, accompanied by introspective music performed on an oud.
The strips of calligraphy are enlivened by the living participation of the air. Their shadows play across the tree bark and echo in the branches. These elemental interactions are the opposite of what Goers called “conceptual, very cognitive, high-functioning art.”
Although he appreciates that sort of art, his study of Buddhist philosophy and meditation helps him to get in touch with the more basic elemental things, like air, which give this art form “a wider scope of entry.”
After I watched the short film, Goers showed me the entrance to a hidden, “inner hall” gallery. With the assistance of Theatre Inconnu’s associate artistic director, Graham Mcdonald, Goers had constructed a quiet room mysteriously hung with black curtains. Dramatically focused spotlights draw attention to 11 profound paintings created with opaque watercolours.
Three of the paintings are based on a lotus image, and the others centre on a gateway. These are painted with confident brush marks, in parallel lines and passages of curving interaction. On close inspection, you can see that the background is alive with brushwork, rendered in colour and tone so close as to be almost indistinguishable from the tinted paper upon which it is painted.
The brush marks become smaller and smaller, eventually fading into the organic nature of the paper. At this point, the artist is no longer separate from the environment.
It is not often one comes across an artist willing to work so patiently, to the point where the ego has pretty well vanished.
Such paintings don’t call attention to themselves. Goers knew that, next to a bold representational acrylic painting in a bright white gallery, those paintings would tend to disappear, which he finds interesting. “Really. It’s just a reflection of the glass. No painting.”
But as the lights change, things emerge. The images come and speak to you. “I think of them that way,” he acknowledged. These are objects that would be a pleasure to live with. It might take six months or even a year to have what the artist called “a reasonably full viewing experience of them.”
After a while in this gallery, I emerged into the daylight newly attuned to the shadows on the wall and the motion of the breeze in the blossoming trees. Really, what more can you ask of art?