Free/Not-Free Paintings

Here's a good question: What makes you free?  Here's another one: what makes you not-free?  All the photographs you see below are of people making some kind of gesture that shows their embodied sense of freedom, even in the midst of the "full catastrophe" of this life.  

From those photographs, and from stories people told me in my travels, I created the Free/Not-Free Thangkas, a series of scroll paintings designed to be shown anywhere there are humans asking, What makes me free?  What makes me not-free?  They are paintings designed to be unrolled in the sacred-ordinary everywhere.

Below, you will find images of all the paintings, with their accompanying stories.  Some of them went on the road with me for the Inner Beauty Pilgrimage to the Sacred-Ordinary Everywhere… Enjoy!