Eye for the Ethereal

2022 · Drawing

Pen and ink, alcohol-based markers, on acid-free paper · 8.5 × 11 in

A higher aim; the root and unravelling of causality. What does it really mean to be enlightened — is it only a momentary state of being? These are the questions I explore through Eye for the Ethereal. Drawn in the ‘stream of consciousness’ style of the series, this triptych grew organically in moments of silence and solitude.

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Heart of Desire

At its centre a pink core glows, and from it a wheel of open hands and dotted petals turns outward — every hand reaching, every reach curving back to the same burning middle. Desire drawn as a mechanism: the quiet engine that sets the rest in motion.

Around the wheel gathers the world it summons — a green-haired woman gazing up at the golden shells of desire, a butterfly at rest, a red-vented bulbul in a halo of dots, a dove uncurling — each thing wanting, and wanted, in turn.

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Facets of Enlightenment

The eye of a peacock feather opens at the top of the page, iridescent and many-ringed — the eye a feather wears, which is also a thousand eyes. Enlightenment appears here not as a single point but as a set of facets: the feather’s patterned gaze, a black eagle climbing a hatched blue sky, a luminous figure stepping out of her own halo of sun.

Below, dotted sun-flowers open on the grass — small, earthbound echoes of the light above. Whether clarity is a place you reach or only a moment that passes through you is the question left hanging in the space between them.

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Ethereal Bloom

A calm, frontal face holds the centre, and it is made of other faces: two profiles turned outward form its own cheeks, so the single head is also a small crowd. From its crown a plume of growth erupts and opens like coral or a fountain, while a band of yellow light crosses where the gaze turns inward.

Around it the ethereal keeps its slow time — a column of moons waxing and waning, a white flower on its stem, animals watching from the edges, an elder’s face dissolving into flame above. Consciousness caught in the act of flowering: not arrived, but opening.