Title
Inexhaustible Virtue
Transcending All Worlds
Medium
graphite on paper
Dimensions
9 ¼ x 13 in.
(23.5 x 33 cm)
framed:
17 x 20 1/8 in.
(43.2 x 51.1 cm)
Year
2014
Private collection
A club motif, often miniscule in scale, is pervasive in the majority of Wudl’s compositions. He typically paints or draws the motif in dense arrangement, and in low contrast to its background. This makes the clubs barely discernable to the eye, and there are passages in several works where they seem to fuse together and become a shimmering backdrop. For Wudl, the club represents the elaborate descriptions of phenomena that are characteristic of the Avatamsaka Sutra’s literary style, and its repetition reflects the sutra’s primary purpose as an exhortation to meditation.
The clubs, or what the artist calls “pips,” can also serve to represent the unseen subatomic particles, such as atoms or molecules that combine to form our physical perceived world.
In Inexhaustible Virtue Transcending All Worlds, the pips propagate to form the boundless ocean, which in the sutra, “symbolizes immensity, depth and immeasurability.” The flower, also made up of tiny pips, straddles between the sky and the ocean, in the midst of emptiness and form.
