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Tchera Niyego: Can you tell me a little more about your book? |
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Ngak’chang Rinpoche, interviewed by Tchera Niyego
Tchera Niyego: Can you tell me a little more about your book?
Ngak’chang Rinpoche: I have always been interested in presenting Vajrayana to artists. There’s an idea about Buddhism in the West, that the most natural crossover is with philosophy, psychology, and science, but that mainly concerns Sutric Buddhism. In terms of Tantric Buddhism, I have always felt that the arts were a far better bridge.
I have written the book as a means of presenting Buddhism to people in the language of the arts. I graduated from Art College and have been involved with art in one form or another all my life—be it as a painter, poet, writer, lyricist, or a blues singer. In the book, I thought it would be useful to present the earlier part of my life as an artist without any reference to Buddhism at all.
While I was working on the book, various things happened. I was having a big clear-out one day, as I do often. I’ve moved house so many times in my life that things have ended up in boxes, which I never opened again. I had gone off to India and stored many boxes my mother’s garage and also in my brother’s loft for many years. Finally, when my wife and I settled into our house in Penarth, we collected all of them back. One of the final boxes we opened had a dusty little plastic box with scotch tape around it, and when I opened it up I found a series of photos that I’d not seen in 40 years—my art college paintings. The originals were all thrown away because when I went to India I left them with a friend who stored them in his parent’s garage. He wrote to me in India saying, “My parents want these out of their garage. Can you come and collect them?” Of course by the time I got the letter it was months too late, and his parents sent all the paintings to the rubbish (laughs). They were all gone. I lost track of the slides as well. Then last year I found them, and it was quite amazing. They were in very bad condition, very dusty and they had some kind of fungus on them. I scanned them anyway, and then worked on them in Photoshop.
TN: So they are digital works on originally oil paintings?
N’cR: Yes. They were originally oil paintings either on canvas or on hardboard. Mostly they were around four foot and six foot square. What is here now are not entirely true to the original paintings because the slides of the original paintings were damaged by age and dust. I washed them off with surgical alcohol and tried to remove the dirt and fungus. What exists now is a cross between the original paintings and new digital works.
TN: At first I’d thought they might have been collages, but there’s no photography involved at all, so in a sense, could we say they’re realistic?
N’cR: Yes. At art college I took an illustration degree. I really wanted to take a fine arts degree, but at the time abstract expressionism was what was wanted, not figurative art. If you were a figurative artist you were given quite a hard time, and so the illustration degree was a “loop hole” for people like myself. I had an extremely nice tutor, wonderful man, Derek Crow, who believed in education—education for education’s sake. So for him it didn’t matter what I did as long as I worked hard and made good use of my time.
TN: May I ask what year this is?
NcR: 1970 to 1976.
TN: And this is when you made the Speaking with Ravens series?
N’cR: Yes. I actually painted most of these in my spare time. They weren’t part of the course, because I was an illustrator, and these were oil paintings, although Derek Crow did get me time on the fine art department and in the sculpture department, too. I worked on sculpture. I did almost everything. What I really wanted was to stay on foundation course where you get to do everything rather than specialize.
TN: The way you’re working with, I imagine, is more about the process. Is it some sort of meditative state that you’re working with while painting?
N’cR: Yes. I’ve been interested in Buddhism since I was seven. The word “meditative” of course means many different things to me. Meditation from the point of view that I like to talk about to people, is simply having the sense fields open and allowing the sense fields to manifest as they are—the senses to dance with the sense fields. This in itself is the meditative state, so when you’re being creative, especially if you’re being creative without concept, when you’re simply being creative, when you’re simply playing the musical instrument, painting, simply writing, and you’re not controlling with concept. I suppose I’m not a great fan of conceptual art (laughs). When you set out with ideas I tend to see how the response to the senses is. It doesn’t have to be rational, and I suppose if I would have to call myself anything it would be a “surrealist,” although I have a pretty broad notion of what surrealism means. I suppose mainly it’s non-rational. That you can go beyond what is rational and make choices that are based on non-rational perception; that I would also call meditation.
TN: I’m wondering how it is that this overlaps with figurative painting because you don’t have an idea of a finished visual, however, you do have a human body in the picture.
N’cR: Yes, well, you see this is accidental (laughs). At art college there are models. It’s traditional that you engage in life drawing so people sit for you, you draw them, you paint them. I’m not sure what happens in art colleges now, but when I was in school, life drawing was very important. We had to paint the live model according to two or more different artistic styles at the same time—a typical late-60s art project, I suppose. I chose surrealism, pointillism, and turn-of-the-century French life model photography as three modes. I really enjoyed the project so much I kept repeating it. I enjoyed it but I also failed at it all the time because I had some sense of what I was trying to get that I wasn’t getting. To look at the live model and to be aware that within the skin tone, the way the light falls on the body, or the way the light falls on anything, you’re not just looking, well, when you’re looking at a body it’s not just pink or it’s not just brown or it’s not just whatever color it appears to be. The more you look at it the more other colors appear and you realize that you are conditioned by ideas of what something is supposed to look like. So the more you look and the more non-conceptual you become, the more you have to believe what is there that you are perceiving. So I had quite a struggle with this. But it was very exciting, I mean when I say I was struggling and being disappointed, that was just part of the process.
Not long after, I started painting my lady friend. I asked her if she would sit for me and she agreed, but said she there were conditions. The condition was that there were ravens in the painting along with her.
TN: That there would be ravens present?
N’cR: Yes, in the painting (laughs). So I said, “Sure. I’ll paint ravens around you.” She liked ravens and I didn’t see any problem. The ravens however came to dominate. There was no particular reason initially for the ravens to be there, just that she wanted ravens and actually, I liked them. The combination of a lady sitting with ravens moving. I became interested in the textures of the background and started experimenting with painting, then letting the painting dry, and then sanding and painting over the painting, sanding, painting, sanding, so all different layers of colors came through. I worked with that technique quite a lot in all kinds of different ways like scratching the painting, smearing it when it’s half dry, in order to build up these layers of texture. The whole process was based on looking at the nature of the texture and bringing it to a point where I felt it worked. But what working meant I couldn’t really describe; I just had to look at it and say I like this now, this works. Non-conceptual. So the lady and the raven were accidents. Much of art for me has grown out of circumstances, and I never felt I had a need to explain why there was a lady and ravens. That just started at one point and continued and I never saw the need to stop, so I just went on painting them. If I liked it I keep doing it you know, like coffee, I like coffee so I drink it every day, and so I painted every day. This would bleed in and out with poetry.
TN: Does it all continue now? Do you still do?
N’cR: No, I don’t paint anymore. Although there’s no saying that I would not start again. I think that people can be trapped as being painters or poets or songwriters or whatever, and as a Buddhist Vajrayanist, a Tantric Buddhist, every Tantrika is an artist of some kind because we have sense fields, we have senses, and appreciating the sense fields makes you an artist, as soon as you look, as soon as you see something.
TN: Do you think that an artist would be in conflict and in dissatisfaction almost all the time when she or he wants to improve?
N’cR: No, when I say never taking second best and not compromising, well, I guess you could think of it as conflict, but I wouldn’t because trying to be true to what you have in your mind, I would see as exciting and challenging and hard work. But then if life is not work, it’s not interesting. You’ve got to be prepared to work, and the harder you work at what you love, the more you get out of it. A lot of happiness comes out of not compromising, always trying to be as true as you can to what you have in your mind, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of joy for others comes out of it because it’s something you can share with other people.
TN: And lastly, would you please ask a question you would like to be asked and answer it, too?
N’cR: (laughs) Well, I would say the question, “What do I want to achieve by the paintings, the book, and anything that is creative?” And I’d say that what I really want is for people to be empowered, to see themselves as artists without necessarily being able to earn a living at it, so that someone who tries to make a living as an artist but fails is not a failed artist. They’ve just failed at it as a career. They’ve failed at commercialism. But they haven’t failed as an artist. You can’t fail as an artist unless you stop painting, unless you stop composing music, unless you stop writing poetry. I would like people to feel empowered, not to feel like failures, also for people who don’t see themselves as artists to think that they could be artists because you never have to sell a painting to be an artist; you just have to keep working at it. And it has to be part of your own experience, part of your own appreciation. So yes, for people to be empowered, and to be able to think of themselves as artists rather than there being artists out there because they’re famous, and I’m not an artist because I’m not famous, and I’ll never be famous.
TN: Are you planning on creating new work now? Painting maybe?
N’cR: I don’t know. I might. I have no immediate plans, and there’s no reason why I wouldn’t. If circumstances came together, sure. Recently an old school friend returned 23 songs to me that I wrote between the ages of 16 and 18. I had thrown them away in 1975 but she kept them. I’m now getting together with a student in California who’s a bass player, and we’re going to make an album. I have the words again so we’re going to put melodies to them; we’re going to put down tracks and get different people we know to play on them because we have quite a few musicians within our community.
TN: Do the words still apply to you the way they are, or do you think you might change them?
N’cR: Well, I was a surrealist then, and I’m still a surrealist; the world’s surreal, so… (laughs).
