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On permanence, Impermanence and the nature of reality

The evening of the first night of a six-day hike through Cradle Mountain in Tasmania,  I walked up the mountain and stumbled upon an emergency fiberglass dome shelter.  With darkness settling in, one headlamp already broken and the cold creeping into my bones, I decided this a good spot to stay.

It was a long, shivering night.

But with the arrival of dawn came a sight that took my breath away.

Before me, the mountain 'Barn Bluff' rose through the distant mist, its immense form appearing and disappearing as the shifting veil of cloud revealed and concealed it.  I felt a profound sense of awe.  There was something both magnificent and strangely elusive about this presence - a mountain that seemed at moments, almost not to be there at all.

I had entered my shelter in the darkness, unaware of  anything beyond the cold and the need to escape the elements, In the morning,  I  stepped out into a world that literally took my breath away.  What I saw was beyond anything I had imagined. The immensity of the moment seemed to defy words. 

The extraordinary stillness enveloped me.  The silence, the cold, the vastness  - everything seemed to dissolve into the mist.

There was such a contradiction before me.  The mountain was undeniably there in all of its beauty, its sharp facets cutting through the mist and yet the mist softened its edges, obscured its form and seemed to envelope it in its obscurity.

I was mesmerized by how something so immense and solid could appear so insubstantial. What I saw was constantly changing, and with it, my perception of the mountain itself.

It brought me to a deeper question. How much of what we believe to be real is shaped by what we can see?  When the familiar begins to dissolve before our eyes, what remains?

Illusionary Mountain

In wonder and awe
Joy alights upon dawns breath
But the dharma mists
Mourn the fading of the sun

Trying to capture the tangible and intangible on paper brought its own challenges.  How do you convey something that is in constant flux without losing the very thing that creates the paradox.  Then it occurred to me that watercolour might be  the perfect medium.  

Watercolour appears and disappears as it meets the paper. Pigment spreads, edges soften, and forms emerge only to dissolve again.  The paper itself becomes part of the mystery, its untouched spaces holding as much significance as the painted ones.

This is what continues to draw me to painting - the possibility of expressing something that exists beyond what we see.  The mountain remains, yet its form shifts and dissolves; the untouched paper becomes as important as the pigment that settles upon it.  I am left wondering whether we ever truly see the world as it is, or only as it appears to us in a fleeting moment.  Perhaps, in learning to look more closely, we begin to understand how much remains unseen constantly in flux.