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Tchera Niyego: Can you tell me a little more about your book? Ngak’chang Rinpoche: The book, yes. There are a lot of things going on at the moment because I’ve always been interested in presenting Vajrayana to artists. There’s always been an idea about Buddhism in the West, but the most natural crossover is with philosophy, psychology, and science, but that really mainly concerns Sutric Buddhism rather than Tantric Buddhism, and I’ve always felt that maybe arts were a far better bridge in terms of Tantric Buddhism. The book is really a way of presenting Buddhism to people in the language of the arts because I went to art college for some five years, and I’ve been involved with art all my life with one form or another, either as a painter, as a poet, as a writer, or as a lyricist, or as a blues singer. |
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Ngak’chang Rinpoche, interviewed by Tchera Niyego
Tchera Niyego: Can you tell me a little more about your book?
Ngak’chang Rinpoche: The book, yes. There are a lot of things going on at the moment because I’ve always been interested in presenting Vajrayana to artists. There’s always been an idea about Buddhism in the West, but the most natural crossover is with philosophy, psychology, and science, but that really mainly concerns Sutric Buddhism rather than Tantric Buddhism, and I’ve always felt that maybe arts were a far better bridge in terms of Tantric Buddhism.
The book is really a way of presenting Buddhism to people in the language of the arts because I went to art college for some five years, and I’ve been involved with art all my life with one form or another, either as a painter, as a poet, as a writer, or as a lyricist, or as a blues singer. I’ve done all those things, and I’ve kept them on this realm although most of my life I’ve spent as a teacher of Buddhism. So I thought it would be useful to present the earlier part of my life as an artist without any reference to Buddhism at all, but just speaking of my life as an artist and allowing the Buddhism to come through that. So that’s one of the projects.
While I was working on that, various interesting things happened. I was having a big clear-out one day. I’m always having a big clear-out. I’ve moved house so often in my life that often things have ended up in boxes, but just never get opened. I’ve gone off to India and things were left in my mother’s garage for many years, and my brother’s loft for many years, and gradually my wife and I’ve collected all the things back again, and now in our house we’re opening them. One of the final boxes we opened had a dusty little plastic box with scotch tape around it, and I opened it up, and there were a series of photos in there that I’d not seen in 40 years, my art college paintings. And I didn’t think I had them. The originals were all thrown away because I’d gone out to India and I’d left them with a friend who kept them in his parent’s garage. He wrote to me in India saying, “My parents want these out of their garage. Can you come and collect them?” And of course by the time I got the letter it was months too late, and his parents had sent all the paintings to the local rubbish chip. (Whistles and laughs.) They’d all gone. So then I lost track of the slides, and I didn’t even had the slides anymore. Then last year I found them, and it was quite amazing. They were in very bad condition, very dusty, and the dust had gone into the boxes, and they had some kind of fungus on them. So I scanned them anyway, and worked on them and that’s what the paintings are.
TN: So they are digital works on originally oil paintings?
N’cR: Yes. They are oil paintings either on canvas or on hardboard. Usually round about between four foot and six foot square. What I have now you can’t really call the original paintings because they were so corrupted by age and dust. I washed them off with alcohol and tried to get the dirt and the fungus off, and all I’ve been able to do is work on those with Photoshop and rebuild them. What I have now is kind of a cross between the originals and new paintings, although you can’t call them paintings anymore because they’re digitally worked on. So they’re digital re-workings of the original oil paintings.
TN: At first I’d thought they might have been collages, but there’s no photography involved at all, so in a sense, could we say they’re realistic?
N’cR: Yes. At art college I took an illustration degree. I really wanted to take a fine art degree, but at the time you didn’t get on well if you weren’t an abstract expressionist. That’s what they wanted; they didn’t want figurative artists, and to be a figurative artist you had quite a hard time, and so the illustration degree was seen as a loop hole, you know, that you could be a figurative artist although, of course, you had to fight the graphic design part then. You had to try to avoid that, but I had an extremely nice tutor, wonderful man, Derek Crow, who believed in education. Education for education’s sake. So for him it didn’t matter what I did as long as I worked because he saw education as just being there and whether people became illustrators or not was irrelevant to him as long as they made good use of their time. So I was very lucky to have him.
TN: May I ask what year this is?
N’cR: The illustration degree would be 1972 to 1975.
TN: And this is when you made the Speaking with Ravens series?
N’cR: Yes. I actually painted most of these in my spare time. They weren’t part of the course really, because I was an illustrator, and there are oil paintings, although Derek Crow did get me time on the fine art department and in the sculpture department, too. I worked on sculpture. I did almost everything. What I really wanted to do was to stay on foundation course where you do everything, and I would have liked to just stayed there doing everything not specializing because I never enjoyed specializing about much. Even within visual art because I’ve always gone into music and poetry and literature, and never been able to stay in one area. I’m always getting ideas about all the arts, apart from theater. Theater is one area that I’ve never gone into, but not because I wasn’t interested, but just because life is limited, and you can’t do everything. I’d go into filmmaking too, anything. The whole creative area just fascinates me.
TN: The way you’re working with, I imagine, is more about the process. Is it some sort of meditative state that you’re working with while painting?
N’cR: Yes. I’ve been interested in Buddhism since I was seven. The word “meditative” of course means many different things to me. Meditation from the point of view that I like to talk about to people is simply having the sense fields open and allowing the sense fields to manifest as they are, the senses to dance with the sense fields. That in itself is the meditative state, so when you’re being creative, especially if you’re being creative without concept, when you’re simply being creative, when you’re simply playing the musical instrument, painting, simply writing, and you’re not controlling with concept. So I suppose I’m not a great fan of conceptual art (laughs). When you set out with ideas I tend to see how the response to the senses is though it doesn’t have to be rational, and I suppose if I would have to call myself anything it would be a “surrealist,” although I had a pretty broad notion of what surrealism means. I suppose mainly there is non-rational. That you can go beyond what is rational, and you can make choices that are based on non-rational perception; that I would also call meditation.
TN: I’m wondering how it is that this overlaps with figurative painting because you don’t have an idea of a finished visual, however, you do have a human body in the picture.
N’cR: Yes, well, you see this is accidental (laughs). At art college you get art college models, and it’s kind of traditional that you engage in life drawing, so people sit for you, you draw them, you paint them. I’m not sure what happens in art colleges now, but when I was there life drawing was very important, so it all started with a project where we had to paint the live model according to two or more different artistic styles at the same time. A typical late-60s art project I suppose. And so I chose surrealism, pointillism, and turn-of-the-century French life model photography as being the three modes, and I just worked within that painting the model. I really enjoyed the project and kept repeating it because I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it but I also failed at it all the time because I had some sense of what I was trying to get that I wasn’t getting. To look at the life model and to be aware that within the skin tone, the way the light falls on the body, or the way the light falls on anything, you’re not just looking, well, when you’re looking at a body it’s not just pink or it’s not just brown or it’s not just whatever color it appears to be. The more you look at it the more other colors there are that you see, and you realize that you’re conditioned by ideas of what something is supposed to look like. So the more you look and the more non-conceptual you become, the more you have to believe what is there that you are perceiving. So I had quite a struggle with this working with it. Very exciting, I mean when I say I was struggling and being disappointed, that was just part of the process of what was going on. Then I started painting my lady friend at the time. I asked her if she’d sit for me and she agreed to sit for me, but said she had some conditions about it, and the condition was that there were ravens.
TN: That there would be ravens present?
N’cR: Yes, in the painting (laughs). So I said, “Sure. I’ll put ravens in.” She liked ravens, so I didn’t see any problem putting ravens in, and the ravens got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. So there was no particular reason for the ravens to be there, just that she wanted ravens. So she got ravens. The ravens were there, and actually I liked them, this combination of this lady sitting there with ravens doing one thing or another. And I became very interested in the textures of the background of this and how this worked, and I started experimenting with painting, then letting the painting dry and then sanding and painting over the painting, sanding, painting, sanding, so you had all these different layers of colors coming through, and I worked with that quite a lot in all kinds of different ways like scratching the painting, smearing it when it’s half dry, in order to build up these layers of texture. The whole process was based around looking at the nature of the texture and bringing it to a point where I felt it worked. But what working means I couldn’t really describe; I just have to look at it and say I like this now, this works. Very non-conceptual. So the lady and the raven were accidents; there was never a reason for them; it just came out of the project, and my lady friend wanted ravens, so she got ravens (laughs), and this was the sole reason for them, not that there was some great idea about what a raven meant or why the lady was there; that never came into it. So a lot of art for me is just always grown out of circumstances, and I never felt I had a need to explain why there was a lady and a raven. That just started at one point and continued and I never saw the need to stop, so I just went on painting them. If I like it I keep doing it you know, like coffee, I like coffee so I drink it every day, and so I paint every day. This would bleed in and out with poetry.
TN: Does it all continue now? Do you still do?
N’cR: No, I don’t paint anymore. Although there’s no saying that I wouldn’t start again. I think that people can be trapped as being painters or poets or songwriters or whatever, and as a Buddhist Vajrayanist, a Tantric Buddhist, every Tantrika is an artist of some kind because we have sense fields, we have senses, and appreciating the sense fields makes you an artist. As soon as you look, as soon as you see something, you know it’s like your bag.
TN: Do you think that an artist would be in conflict and in dissatisfaction almost all the time when she or he wants to improve?
N’cR: No, when I say never taking second best and always not compromising, well, I guess you could think of it as conflict, but I wouldn’t because trying to be true to what you have in your mind, I would see as exciting! And challenging and hard work. But then if life is not work, then it’s not interesting, you know. You’ve got to be prepared to work, and the harder you work at what you love, the more you get out of it. A lot of happiness comes out of not compromising, always trying to be as true as you can to what you have in your mind, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of joy for others comes out of it because it’s something you can share with other people.
TN: And lastly, would you please ask a question you would like to be asked and answer it, too?
N’cR: (laughs) Well, I would say the question, “What do I want to achieve by the paintings, the book, and anything I do like that is creative?” And I’d say that the answer to that question is that what I really want is for people to be empowered, to see themselves as artists without necessarily being able to earn a living at it, so that someone who tries to make a living as an artist but fails is not a failed artist. They’ve just failed at it as a career. They’ve failed at commercialism. But they haven’t failed as an artist. You can’t fail as an artist unless you stop painting, unless you stop composing music, unless you stop writing poetry. You may fail to earn a living at it, but you don’t have to fail as a painter, poet, songwriter, whatever, you could just continue. So I would like people to feel empowered, not to feel like failures, also for people who don’t see themselves as artists to think that they could be artists because you never have to sell a painting to be an artist; you just have to keep working at it. And it has to be part of your own experience, part of your own appreciation. So yes, for people to be empowered, and to be able to think of themselves as artists rather than there being artists out there because they’re famous, and I’m not an artist because I’m not famous, and I’ll never be famous.
TN: Are you planning on creating new work now? Painting maybe?
N’cR: I don’t know. I might. I have no immediate plans, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t; it’s more circumstances. If there was the circumstances that came together, sure. Recently an old school friend returned to me 23 songs I wrote between the ages of 60 and 18. I’d thrown them away in 1975. She kept them and returned them to me, and I’m now getting together with a student in California who’s a base player, and we’re going to make an album. There’re the words again. We’re going to put melodies to them; we’re going to put down tracks and get different people we know to play on them because we have quite a few musicians within our community.
TN: Do the words still apply to you the way they are, or do you think you might change them?
N’cR: Well, I was a surrealist then, and I’m still a surrealist; the world’s surreal, so… (laughs).
