John Domont’s Indiana landscapes have assumed a sort of iconic status. Golden fields tapering off into distant horizons, trees arcing over a forest path, somber barns beneath sprawling skies — all of it ablaze with color seemingly lit from within. These are Domont’s signatures, or at least his best-known ones.

Then there are the begging bowls.

It’s as if all the colors of his landscapes were poured into them, alchemically transformed and reborn as receptacles for the divine — however it makes itself known, to whoever is looking.

“Water to me represents grace,” John Domont says, gesturing to an unseen cascade of it as we sit talking in his Domont Studio Gallery. Domont’s recent begging bowl paintings, which surround us, often contain images or suggestions of water: It spills from bowls or flows into them, often indistinguishable from a cloud-infused heaven.

“I had a teacher in New York who taught me about the concept of the begging bowl,” Domont says. The teacher quoted an ancient Taoist script that read, “Come before the Divine within the bowl, an empty bowl, a beggar’s bowl.” Domont has been painting begging bowls ever since — and that was 1987. That moment, and the resulting practice, marked a turning point. “It just gave me a certain sense of balanced humility, natural humility, as opposed to a social adaptation,” Domont recalls.

Domont has numbered his bowls from the beginning. Begging Bowl No. 60 is beautifully turbulent, its bowl slightly tipped, all sky and water. The bowl seems to emerge from both at once, as if it were at once entity and reflection.

As he puts it, “This is my response to life — my thank you. This is the thread of life that I walk forward with.”

View the begging bowls at Domont Studio Gallery, 545 S. East St. Call 317-685-9634 or visit www.domontgallery for hours and information.