Buddha Gallery — Buddha Jottings

What interests me, hugely, is the process through which an image comes into being. I love to explore the working method of other artists, looking through their sketchbooks, seeing the preliminary studies, and studying the drafts for finished pieces. It interests me to see the explorations, unfinished or imperfect: the works in progress, which were the stepping stones to later achievements.

My own sketchbooks and meditation diaries are full of these kinds of explorations. Exploring Buddhist iconography, I make 'Buddha-jottings' which catch an idea or a moment of experience. It might be just a few scribbles of colour notation, or an exploration of expression or gesture, or something heavily worked which didn't reach a satisfactory resolution.

In case you share my interest in the process of arriving at an image, here are some selections from my notebooks.

It's interesting to notice how these sketches manifest in later more finished work. The concept of Vajrapani exploding like a firework, shown in the sketch below, comes to fruition in the Vajrapani commission carried out a couple of years later,(see the Commissions page) while the idea for an African Tara hinted at in the above sketch has yet to work its way into a more developed painting.