-in from the storm-

　I was finishing a new series of large oil on canvas paintings when the Covid 19 Pandemic changed our world. During the early stages of the pandemic, I stopped working in oil paint. It didn’t seem the right medium to be working in, too heavy, too durable, taking up too much space, something more ephemeral would I decided be more suited to the new uncertain, and existentially anxious times we suddenly found ourselves living in.
　Since the mid 1990’s while living in America, I began to sincerely look for something profound in my art, but the closer I got to what I believed to be that profoundness, the further away I felt from it. Like looking for silence in a quiet place but only finding nothing but noise there. I had already trained in Buddhist meditation when I lived in the UK over 40 years ago, and then again later as a trainee monk in the Tendai tradition of Japanese Buddhism in Japan. In America I studied the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda, and on my return to Japan from America, I would go to my local Rinzai Zen temple to sit zazen night after night when I came home from teaching art at University. Eventually, I stopped looking for any more of that elusive profoundness and just sat in meditation with whatever came.
　A very wise Thai Buddhist teacher once said that meditating seriously is like walking headlong into a storm. I agree. For me as an artist, making paintings has also often felt like walking into a storm.
Our present time has brought a new and altogether unique storm. An exhausting storm of images and information that we are subjected to daily from the internet by various seductive delivery devices.
　If we are caught in any kind of storm we normally look for shelter, somewhere quiet where we can watch or listen to the storm without being caught up in it. The experience of making these new and liberating paintings has become like this, and I am grateful to have a place to come back to, back in from the storm.

Simon (Fitzgerald) Moriguchi
Osaka Japan, 2021