Born in Trinidad, West Indies,1945, Richard Stodart is a self-taught artist with a Fine Arts degree from Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, 1971. In 1973, he won a Canada Council Grant for a figurative series of paintings exploring the relationship of the self and reality, in and through presence. His work has been internationally exhibited.
Nondual existence-time/emptiness in Dogen's Zen plays an important role in Richard Stodart's dream expounding and dream making painting experience. In this discontinuous continuity, self and reality cofocally conjoin as a reflexive dynamic of existence-time, in and through emptiness, which immerses itself in and goes beyond the inclusive dynamic.
"In the painting process, the focus of the discontinuous embodying body — the self, paint, ideas, thoughts of the past and future — conjoins with the focus of the continuous mind — the inexpressible reality-all sentient beings, in and through the focus of embodying — emptiness. As such, the self is darkened and reality is illumined. Conversely, reality is darkened and moves to the self which it illumines. In this rapture of existence-time — a painted picture/painting a picture — the symbol is the symbolized."
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).
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.
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
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
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