John Marron closes his eyes when he paints. form, emptiness (shunyata), wabi/sabi, intention, representation, virtuosity, history,aesthetics, color, perfect flaws,originality, art& beauty all disappear …. vegetable char floats up to inspire the page, be it water, rice paper or clear sky …. a quick graph of the point blank now remains … his brush with spontaneity, swipe of kitchen towel, twig, divining rod, rip of saran wrap, invisibility wand, palette knife, found object or pipette come into the moment to create whooshes out of simple means, ephemeral selves or sacred nothings ……. . mystery abounds …. where you find it …. or embody it …. sumi-e, for him, is a style, a term for “black ink” in japanese, a wacky pseudo ideogram, a fun, easy, inexpensive way to get off the merry-go round /full stop ….
as co-founder of the Princeton area zen group(pazg), Highland Park Art Collective (HPAC), editor of as is so & so press, author of the haiku book “blips” (amazon/ black angel press-(2012), and student of Aitken Roshi, Trungpa Rinpoche, Kaz Tanahashi and Suzuki Roshi, he hopes you too close your eyes and breathe into these clear marks .. what you see (eyeye) is the freedom to forget your suffering and fleeting attachments to whatever and just be, sans i, for a nano-enzo-ichi second