About Richard Stodart
Born in Trinidad, West Indies, in 1945, Richard Stodart is a self-taught artist with a Fine Arts degree from Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, in 1971. In 1973, he won a Canada Council Grant for a figurative series of paintings exploring the dynamic of self and reality, in and through presence. His work has been internationally exhibited.
While painting, I work my way to an expressible image of the whole through a push and pull with the embodying body (the expressive activity of ideas/feelings and symbols/images) and mind (the active expression of the full round moon shape of reality), in and through emptiness. In this embodying process of radical relatedness, I weigh body and mind as orientational foci of opening and illumining, speaking and listening, encountering and making, the expressed and the inexpressible, ineffability and unnameability, for their dynamic equilibrium as unattainability.
Stodart has published three books on his work: Free and Easy Wandering: Markings On The Way, DreamMaking: The Intimacy of Picture/Reality, and The Someone In Painting/A Picture, a retrospective of his paintings, drawings, and reflections on nonduality, from 1973 to 2014. See below to order.
Painting right: Fu-shiryo/Shiryo/Hi-shiryo (What not-thinking is This thinking that comes Thus nonthinking).
Books
Free And Easy Wandering
Markings On The Way
From ancient times to the present, from Homer's Odyssey to Dereck Walcott's epic poem, Omeros, the hero journeys to faraway places in search of adventure and freedom. In Free And Easy Wandering: Markings On the Way, a wanderer enters the sweeping play of nondual existence to discover the central truth of nature.
Published by Fourth Lloyd Productions, LLC
2007 84 page, paper
ISBN: 978-0-9717806-3-7
8.5" x 11", 17 color plates
$29.00
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and from publisher www.fourthlloydproductions.com
The Someone In Painting/A Picture
Fourth Lloyd Productions, 2016
268 pages, paper ISBN 978-0-9889391-2-7
8.5" x 10.5",199 color plates; 15 b/w plates
$38.00
In this comprehensive retrospective of figurative and abstract paintings and drawings by Richard Stodart, from 1973 to 2014, self and reality — as pairs of quest and realization, differentiation and equality, delusion and enlightenment, thinking and meditation, picture and painting, embodying and the embodying body — are examined in the context of the mediator that weighs them for equilibrium.
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and from publisher www.fourthlloydproductions.com
DreamMaking
The Intimacy Of Picture/Reality
Paintings by Richard Stodart
Words by Hee-Jin Kim
Publisher: Fourth Lloyd Productions, 2013
84 pages, paper ISBN: 978-0-9889391-1-0
10" x 7," 22 color plates
$39.95
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and from publisher www.fourthlloydproductions.com
Since there is no way out of the dream,
the only way to live authentically is within a dream,
to go beyond a dream by way of
expounding/making a dream.
The path of progress in realization
consists not in supplanting dream
so much as clarifying, penetrating, and
surpassing it in and through itself.
'Seeing things as they are' is 'iberation" (todatsu)—
'penetrating and casting off the whole body' and
'the whole being penetrated and cast off'.
Every practitioner's task is to make or change things
by seeing through their 'undefiledness' (fuzenna).
This the kernel of negotiating the Way.
—Excerpt fom Meditation and Thinking by Hee-Jin Kim.
