The Space Baby Buddha was one of my first paintings after deciding to make an effort to learn more about painting. I hadn't drawn or painted very much at all since leaving school in 1989. I decided to pick up my pencils to develop my drawing ability and learn how to paint, as my experience with painting was very limited at this time in 2001 - twelve years later.
Around this time, I had been reading into topics including Buddhism, Hinduism, Jungian Psychology and material of an esoteric and occultism nature.
I experimented with Jung's idea of active imagination and the Space Baby Buddha appeared to me, in my mind's eye. I wanted to give the Space Baby Buddha form, so proceeded to paint him using acrylic on a piece of board.
After finishing the painting and looking at it, I noticed I had unwittingly painted an assortment of symbols which seemed to relate to a 'mandala' theme. I had painted night and day, or light and dark, along with 'good' and 'evil' and four elements surrounding the Space Baby. The Space Baby seemed to represent a 'timeless' wisdom and although appearing as a young child, the Space Baby was also an ancient entity, embodying a 'pure' wisdom.
At the time, I remember finding my own intuition and listening to what it would say, instead of what I had done before and to ignore intuition completely. Prior to discovering intuition was in fact a real function of our being, I denied it's very existence and didn't believe intuition existed in reality. In the painting, intuition is represented by the green orb within the gold cross on the Space Baby's crown.
After reading Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, I developed a clearer understanding of the entity and other entities which had and would emerge from my unconscious mind, leading on to a further understanding of what may be hidden within in our minds.
