Flight of the Ribbon Bird

This painting started while live-painting at an event in May. The very first layers were loose, expressive, drippy and playful- which seems to have translated well into the final image. After a few days of painting, a bulk of the geometrically-structured composure started to form. I didn’t want this piece to get too “mathy” so I would throw more gestural strokes over and through the geometric sections. After finding a few “ribbons” to render to completion, the theme of this painting stood out clearly to me. Seeing the ribbons flow in, out and around the structures reminded me of this teaching by Ram Dass concerning practice, patience and timelessness:

‘A sage was asked, “How long have we been on this journey?” He replied, “Imagine a mountain three miles wide, three miles high, and three miles long. Once every hundred years, a bird flies over the mountain, holding a silk scarf in its beak, which it brushes across the surface of the mountain. The time it would take for the scarf to wear down the mountain is how long we’ve been doing this.”

‘You do your practices not out of a sense of duty or because you think you should, but because you know in your soul there really is nothing else you would rather do.’

-ramdass.org