Synopsis
Why on Earth Does God Have to Paint? /Centripetal Art
by RAFAEL CHODOS
Based on Selected Works and Writings of JUNKO CHODOS
A book that shows how art can move from the soul of the artist to the soul of the viewer.
As a young child living through the Allied bombings of Japan in World War II, Junko painted secretly, passionately, in bomb shelters and other hiding places. For years she viewed her art as something dark and ugly, something to hide from the world. But out of the blue when she was in her early thirties, during a desperate time just after she had moved to America, a spiritual teacher in Japan whom she had never met told a friend of hers that he had seen her art psychically, and that God was painting through her. When Junko heard this she gasped and whispered, Why on earth does God have to paint?
As she contemplated this question, Junko reached the realization that the darkest thing can become a source of radiant light and that art can reveal the mystery of this transformation. In this way she arrived at a new conception of art which she named Centripetal Art. The artist journeys towards her center in order to encounter divine presence there. The artwork is the trace on paper of her journey and of her struggle to transcend her personal fears and traumas. Creating art is a process of individuation. If the artist s struggle is successful, then the viewer can participate in it and take steps on a journey of his own. This is the power of art, and its gift.
This book is the story of Junko s journey told by her husband of nearly forty years. It includes an analysis of her powerful body of over a thousand works and shows how Centripetal Art can raise the consciousness of individual viewers. This new kind of art gives the viewer the courage and the hope to confront darkness his own darkness and darkness in the world and to go beyond it, and beyond complacency, orthodoxy, dogma, ethnicity, race, and gender. This book is also the inner story of Rafael and Junko s intercultural marriage and of their shared spiritual striving.
About the Author
Rafael Chodos is a lawyer who has been in solo practice for over thirty years handling sophisticated business litigation and transactional work. He describes the law as "society's on-going quest for integrity in interpersonal affairs," and has lectured and written often on this topic.
Mr. Chodos has lectured at graduate university seminars, and has published in respected collections of essays on biblical scholarship. His essays include a recently published analysis of The Book of Job as a multicultural case report (in Probing the Frontiers of Biblical Studies, in the Princeton Theological Monograph Series, Wipf & Stock, 2009); an essay titled "The Cry of Eden" which presents an original analysis of that story in the Book of Genesis (in vol. 1 of the series, Presenting the Past published by Brill/ Leiden, Boston, 2008); and an essay titled, "God Does Not Require Obedience: He Abhors It" in volume 4 of a collection of essays titled The Destructive Power of Religion (Praeger, Dec. 2003) . His first book, The Jewish Attitude Towards Justice and Law (dist. E.J. Brill, 1984), was the beginning of his effort to find a deep integration of his interests in law and religion.
Rafael grew up in a household full of books and music: his father was a prominent rabbi who taught him Hebrew. He studied Latin in high school, and taught himself classical Greek after completing the Latin curriculum several months ahead of schedule. He left his family home at the age of sixteen and earned his way through college and graduate school teaching those classical languages. But on the way he pursued entirely different kinds of adventures: he worked as a halibut fisherman in Alaska and stood guard on deck with a rifle to ward off pirates; he was a construction worker for a while in Alaska and Oregon. Through his marriage to his second wife, Junko, a Japanese-born painter and visual artist who has exhibited in one-person shows in galleries and museums, he learned about the visual arts. In the 1990s he lectured on "Masculine and Feminine Aspects of Art and Law" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and in 2001 he published an award-winning catalog of his wife's art, Metamorphoses: The Transformative Vision of Junko Chodos. Mr. Chodos has produced a short film featuring her art (Cry of Ecstasy, 2005) and he composed the music for some short animations he produced in 2007 and 2008, featuring her art. Furthering his effort to integrate art and religion, in 2008, Mr. Chodos published a stunning e-Book titled Centripetal Art/ Matrix of Growth and in 2009, he published a spinoff, print version. He is the author of many essays and short stories, some of which can now be found on Amazon's Kindle.
In 2005 and 2006, Mr. Chodos hosted a radio talk show in Phoenix, Arizona, titled "The No Small Talk Show." In 2008, he was invited to design and then teach a course on "Law, Ethics, and the Enterprise" at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley (1964). After college he worked for IBM as a programming trainee and spent fifteen years in the then-fledgling computer software field. He founded and operated a computer firm in the 1970s (long before the days of the personal computer) that developed expert systems using artificial intelligence techniques to design very large telecommunications networks. He retains a strong interest in computing. His website: chodos.com
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