Lawrence Waldron was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and received his primary school education at Our Lady of Fatima, R.C. School in Laventille and secondary education at College of the Immaculate Conception in Port-of-Spain, before moving to New York in 1985.
In 1993, he graduated from St. John's University with a BFA in Fine Arts and attained an MFA from School of Visual Arts in 1998.
He has been teaching art and art history at the college level since graduating S.V.A., primarily at St. John’s University and LaGuardia Community College branch of the City University of New York (CUNY).
He has attained a Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) degree on his way to a Ph.D. in art history at CUNY’s Graduate Center and is currently writing his dissertation on the ceramics of the Pre-Columbian Eastern Caribbean. At CUNY Graduate Center, his major has been Non-Western Art, including African, Native American, Islamic and Asian subjects.
Lawrence Waldron has exhibited every year for the past two decades at galleries, schools and cultural centres.
Philosophy:
While his body of work is diverse, encompassing the media of watercolour, oil and acrylic painting, terra cotta sculpture and photography, Waldron’s main series employs the use of the leaves of the lotus plant. The choice to work with the leaves of this sacred flower was made with a certain reverence.
Rooting in the murky, muddy bottoms of lakes and ponds, the lotus grows upwards towards the light, through increasingly clarified levels of water to blossom far above the water, a pristine and peerless flower. For the religions of India, this flower provides a natural analogy for the ascent of the human consciousness, rising through increasingly rarified levels of intellectual and spiritual attainment. Ultimately, the lotus is a symbol of transcendence, in that this aquatic flower, from its first germination in muck to full maturation in beaming purity, though nourished by water, is itself water repellant. Far above the water’s surface, not even rain can stick to the lotus. It simply beads up and rolls off in a slight breeze.
It is to this transcendent plant that Waldron brings another set of Indic principles: the concept of the Buddhist mandala (a concentric diagram with graduated levels of attainment towards a central, pinnacle-goal). The mandala is an art form he has studied as a “Non-Western” (i.e. Extra-Western) art historian and he has had some modest training in mandala iconography with a Tibetan teacher, Lama Dhondup Tsering from Chusang Monastery in Nepal. The transcendent nature of the mandala is of great interest to Waldron because “while it illustrates a quest towards a goal, a goal often to be attained through some technique of meditation, one of the first things we learn from Buddhist monks after we start meditating is to let go of our goal. Clinging to nirvana or peace or quietude is a sure way to let these slip through one’s fingers.”
So how does one attain something of which one must let go? The answer is the simplest and most complex one could get: Make letting go the goal, and then letting go of it will be the attainment thereof. This is only confusing as a mental puzzle. But on the meditation cushion where all semiotic systems are eventually suspended, it makes perfect and practical sense. This is transcendence, the theme of many mandalas, including Waldron’s lotus leaf mandalas.
These mandalas take the letting go idea somewhat literally in that they feature an “empty” space (more correctly described as an “interval”) at their center, with no saint or divinity as in Hindu and Buddhist sacred diagrams. This open area is meant to evoke the blissful state of empty boundlessness felt by many people as they practice Vipassana or Zen meditation especially, a feeling only possible after looking through and transcending their own thoughts. Even in the midst of crowds and catastrophes, many Buddhist practitioners try to maintain this detached, quiet core, even as they keenly participate in the maelstrom of daily activities. This is the letting go, learned on the meditation cushion, put into action on the street.
Like with the levels of spiritual attainment and the lotus’ growth, this quiet-empty-center idea has natural analogies. “The one that most stands out to me comes from my native Caribbean: the hurricane. At the center of a hurricane is a still, hot silence, full of potential energy, but feeling completely inert. It is not simply ‘dead air,’ but is the very heart of the hurricane, the vacuum from which the storm derives its rotation. If even hurricanes are quiet at their core, perhaps I can be too.”
Technique:
Any artistic use of the lotus plant would necessarily access its profound symbolism. My aim therefore, is to employ the physical and symbolic presence of the lotus plant while giving expression to my current ideas about Buddhist philosophy: engaging in a dialogue between iconography and materials.
The water resistant surface of the lotus leaf is modified by the pointed heat of lit incense, the cutting edge of a small blade, is embellished with gouache (the only non-toxic pigment he has found that sticks to the waxy leaf’s surface) with small amounts of rose water as thinner or by whatever other “respectful” means he can devise. The utmost effort is made to never subsume or countermand the ‘innate’ symbolism of the lotus. “This deep respect for the medium and the resultant self-imposed restrictions on how to use it are the source of my innovations with respect to making art from, with and about this sacred plant.”
Contact: ieredelta@yahoo.com
Homepages: http://lotusroots.freeservers.com
http://agta.4t.com/
http://www.ancientantilles.com/
Hurricane Mandala, lotus leaves, gouache and pyro-engraving, 2008
Mayadevi-garbha (tribute to the Buddha's mother), lotus leaf and gouache, 1998
Lotus for Shifu, watercolour on paper, 1995
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Neslyn, oil on Belgian linen, 2005
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Pelau Mandala, peas, beans, rice and lotus roots, 1999
Bardo, lotus leaf, bay leaf and gouache, 1999
Schism Mandala, pyro-engraved lotus leaves, 2000
Lawrence Waldron