Sumangali.org: In The Spirit Of Serendipity

I don’t mind admitting that beauty is crucial for my inspiration: in itself, and as a context for other experiences. Beauty owns a door through which I reach the vestibule of love for God, from which I can (potentially) access doors to other spiritual qualities: service, patience, trust, carefulness, willingness, (et al, ad infinitum). If I return through the door to beauty having experienced love for God in that central vestibule, that beauty is augmented.

Colours are nutrients. I crave them and forage for them. When I see a new combination or ingenious use, I gorge and am replete. A visual clash or lack of care unnerves me like an ugly noise. Like sounds or scents colours harbour harmony or dissonance; they breathe or bleed life and energy.

On the balance of my life’s priorities, it was the relative weight of beauty that enticed me to study art.

It was not glamorous.

Socks, books, hair, fingernails all betrayed my occupation. Everything I owned was ink-smirched or bore a stray blotch of colour in a circle of oil. However carefully the charcoal was stowed, a crushed stub would find itself a most inconvenient and disappointing home.

I walked eight miles a day on flimsy plimsolls, in all the relentless weathers of North Yorkshire, existing mainly on potatoes and donuts. Why? To pass a day in paint fumes, observing the scales of a dead fish, or callusing my young fingers with wire. Why?

They were bleak, hungry years, but they were beauty – inward and outward.

I went nowhere without a sketchbook, and nowhere without observing the shades, shapes and spaces in things. Fine art formed my first year, but textiles and costume followed. My tutor was ruthless, for which I am now glad – that built me self-assurance. For me her common comment was: “Nice maquette” when presented with a finished piece. Costume thrives on impermanence, thus its enchantment. It is now that I can see reverence for impermanence as a useful quality: to move on to higher perfection without attachment. Are we not ourselves just God’s maquettes?

We are fortunate indeed to have devised ways of reproducing colour. Gone the days when blue came only sparingly from the grinding of precious lapis lazuli, and the hues of cloth relied on the nearest available herb. At the click of a button we may change the shade or shape of anything.

Yet in God’s Lila the spectrum always jumped and spread in endless glory as it does now. The cornflower defeats even lapis in brilliance; the sunflower deafens a saffron robe. I am more content nowadays to see art in natural situ; un-transferred to canvas, and un-described by paint.

IMAGE:
Courtesy of my Mum: me making a happy mess of colour, age 2.

LINKS:
For an in-depth study of the relationship between art and spirituality, you may be interested in Art’s Life and the Soul’s Light by Sri Chinmoy

Shakespeare in a comic book? This is serendipity, as I’d never have expected him there. In fact I wouldn’t have even looked.

The other day my mother was remembering the comics my brother used to read twenty-something years ago. We got as far as The Beano and The Dandy, when she said with a frown, “Did you have comics?”

“No!” I said as if stung, “I used to read magazines.”

“Oh yes, of course.”

I realised that even before my teens I regarded comics as something for those who are either just barely literate, or too lazy to read, or male and under the age of ten. As is so often the case, my mind was broadened only hours later, this time by an article in the Independent, heralding Britain’s latest homegrown hybrid: Manga Shakespeare.

Manga is Japanese for “random (or whimsical) pictures”. It firmly took root in the late 18th Century, drawing inspiration from 12th Century giga (literally “funny pictures”), blossoming in the early 19th Century, with the great Hokusai even producing his own manga collection. Originally wood-block prints, the modern story-based manga started to emerge in the form of drawings as Japan increasingly absorbed American influences.

Manga is much more culturally important to Japan than comic books are to the US. Weekly sales of manga in Japan even exceed annual sales of comics in America (source: Wikipedia). In the UK at least, manga, anime (animated manga), and in fact anything Japanese is no doubt rising in popularity.

Self Made Hero is a British team, set to release their Manga Shakespeare collection this Thursday 1st of March. Emma Hayley, director of SelfMadeHero says:

“With our fresh and innovative approach to the classics, we are creating exciting and unique books that will inspire today’s generation.”
—SelfMadeHero.com

Good luck, I say. Anything (well almost anything) that makes the Bard more easily accessible has to be a good thing. Shakespeare is not a pompous poet in tights to be kept mouldering on the dusty shelves of aging professors; he’s a genius storyteller, and you shouldn’t have to be a genius to unravel the brilliance of his work. His plays are timeless, and infinitely adaptable. True, the original language is hard going, but if the essence of the stories is revealed to a wider audience, then maybe more will be inspired to delve into the treasure chest of his original works, while they’re young enough to keep up with the thrilling pace.

“Manga is a dynamic, emotional and cinematic medium easily absorbed by the eye. Its attractive art and simple storytelling methods will enthuse readers to approach Shakespeare’s work in the way he intended – as entertainment.”
—SelfMadeHero.com

Later in the year a collection entitled The Classical Eye will be released by the team, so watch this space:

“…transforming classics into another art form. The books feature acknowledged leaders in the world of graphic novels and bandes dessinées, using illustrators and writers whose work is widely admired internationally.
—SelfMadeHero.com

Image Source: SelfMadeHero.com

This post is long overdue—perhaps about 20 years or so, as that’s how long I’ve admired Andy Goldsworthy’s approach to art. Thank God for the humble camera—without it most of his art would melt, blow, or rot back into the elements from whence it came, in the space of time it takes for the winds or tides to change, or the temperature to cheer up.

The sculptor-photographer was born in Cheshire, 1956, but now calls Scotland his home. I was first drawn in by an exhibition that everyone was raving about at art school. It was probably in Leeds City Art Gallery—because that’s about as far as we could ever afford to go from Harrogate—I don’t remember anything about it except the dumbfounded silence it left me with, and some shots of autumn leaves blazing in my mind’s eye.

A bunch of autumn leaves has always been enough to transport me—see God In a Nutshell—but it was the way he celebrated them that blew me away. This is how nature should be revered, I thought: an interaction leaving no lasting mark of interference, more a mute conversation between creator and Creator, or a game, knowing the latter will win in the end, but enjoying the play all the more for it.

When happening upon one of nature’s myriad miracles, rather than saying “That’s nice” and walking on by, Andy Goldsworthy dives right into the colours, patterns, shapes, textures, observes the rules of nature and extends them, enhances them, outlines them. If anyone is not afraid to get their hands dirty it’s him; using not just hands but teeth, feet and nearby natural materials as tools to coax leaves, mud, twigs and ice into new forms. It’s more than “environmentally friendly”; it is “environment,” but the dry leaves are poured on the earth like molten metal, the rough stones are soft giant eggs, the hostile ice enormous jewels.

Transience in art has always been a source of fascination to me, basically because that’s how God works. Man can echo that occupation of enjoying the process of creation, pausing proudly besotted with the product of it to celebrate its perfection, then moving on to a higher perfection. I love that.

“The artist’s long engagement with the dome parallels his interest in the markers of human passage through time—the structure itself follows a trajectory that includes Neolithic burial chambers and dwelling cairns, ancient Roman and Byzantine structures, Enlightenment architecture and modern public buildings.

The domical form developed in the artist’s oeuvre from his desire to give depth to the hole, or void, a device that has occupied Goldsworthy’s attention since early in his career. His decision to construct a dome with oculus on this site owes much to its northern orientation, which allows for a velvety black hole that no light can penetrate.”

US National Gallery of Art on the exhibition pictured below

I know nothing of his reasons for this recurring dome theme, but to me it is a glimpse of Infinity: a reminder of our own transience on the material plane of stone, ice and leaves, and of an eternal existence beyond it.

Andy, it’s not often I feel pride in being British, but right now, revisiting your art, I’m glowing with the stuff.

Links and Credits:

1. Morning Earth: nice tribute and collection of images
2. UK Government Art Collection: fine collection of gritty ice and stone sculptures.
3. US National Gallery: drystone dome exhibition in Washington 2004-5, pictured above

You can read more thoughts on art on my SriChinmoyCentre.org pages