2013 • 33″ x 42.5″
acrylic, spray paint on used fence pickets

This is a second attempt at portraying the Buddha bottling up the extremes of good and evil, maintaining The Middle Way:

The Middle Way…implies a balanced approach to life and the regulation of one’s impulses and behavior, close to Aristotle’s idea of the “golden mean” whereby “every virtue is a mean between two extremes, each of which is a vice.

I added alliteration and food reference to make it even more fun. Incorporating the pepper imagery with the Buddha allow me to make this piece look like a product label or old sign graphic. Medium strength peppers reference the spicing up life with just a little kick but not enough to make your scalp sweat.

Next up perhaps is a piece about Aristotle and The Golden Mean:

In philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, the golden mean is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency. For example courage, a virtue, if taken to excess would manifest as recklessness and if deficient as cowardice.

Socrates teaches that a man “must know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible”.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

Posted by WOODCOCK

After a long exile in South Texas climbing out of a nihilistic funk, Otis Woodcock has found his way back to the open skies and quiet horizons of the American prairie. Having earned an MFA from Miami University, Ohio, he left his ancestral home in southern Indiana, spending the last three decades between Louisville, Kentucky, and San Antonio, Texas, developing his Iconoclasmatic Pop Art™ practice. On this journey, an anxious recovering Catholic and cancer survivor gradually evolved into the optimistic existentialist whose work is less interested in providing answers than in questioning certainty. Today, Woodcock lives and works where the seasonal rhythms and expansive landscapes of the Midwest serve as the backdrop for an ongoing exploration of belief systems, cultural inheritance, and the subtle poetry of ordinary things.

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  1. Alice Canestaro-Garcia May 17, 2014 at 6:23 pm

    lovely y gently funny … would non-GMO apply to this image?

    I’d love to Share some non-GMO images on our local San Antonio March Against Monsanto
    https://www.facebook.com/events/217805418417262/

    also see (which I just saw today for first time)
    https://www.facebook.com/ArtistsAgainstMonsanto

    1. Moe Profane May 17, 2014 at 8:16 pm

      This really has nothing to do with GMOs. You can use however you want though 🙂 Just send the people back this way please.

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