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”.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – End 🤗

Posted by Dick Van der Wurst

Having descended down into South Texas through the Hill Country one day long ago, Dick never claimed to be Texan, but his German heritage and love for tacos is something he shares with the inhabitants of the region. Having earned an MFA from Miami University, OH, he spent the worst years of his life up north, maturing artistically and refining an Iconoclasmatic Pop Art™ style shaped by his experiences as a recovering Catholic, cancer survivor and optimistic existentialist. He lives and works in his humble turquoise studio-home (Dick’s WurstHaus Art Shanty) near downtown San Antonio.

  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. 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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