Time is the most Surreal of all

Thursday, July 20, 2006 posted by Augustina at 5:17 AM

Integral artists

Integral art can be defined as art that reaches across multiple quadrants and levels, or simply as art that was created by someone who thinks or acts in an integral way.
Alex Grey is a psychedelic visual artist whose works have been admired by Wilber and others.
Stuart Davis is an eclectic musician whose works include the concept album Bright Apocalypse. Mystical and integral themes feature large in his lyrics.
Saul Williams is a hip-hop artist who is associated with the Integral Institute.
Wilber is a big fan of the Wachowski brothers. He considers the Matrix series to convey important philosophical truths, and has done a DVD commentary track on them with philosopher Cornel West. Art Integral Blog - Matthew Dallman

Unbound Verdant Cover

From: "barin chaki" barin_chaki@yahoo.co.in To: "Tusar N. Mohapatra" tusarnmohapatra@mail.com Subject: Re: Fw: New comment on Life and Yoga By Sri Aurobindo Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:13:19 +0100 (BST)

Dear Tusar,
I should have replied you earlier, but I was a bit disturbed and busy otherwise for the last one week, as a result of which I could not proceed ahead with my Blogs and I could not also reply you. But anyhow, finding you back, in a far greater perspective, is indeed a matter of great joy!

I have gone through your blogs and also the blog of your daughters. I liked the painting Unbound of your daughter Rimina in Panorama, one of her Blogs. The painting Verdant Cover by Silika is also beautiful.

Regarding the comment by gnat, I will post a comment later in your Blog. Thanking your for remembering me. I have began another Blog in Blogspot : The New Vision. With the best wishes, for you and for your family-members, Barin 28-07-2006 From Barindranath Chaki The New Horizon - http://www.freewebs.com/barinchaki/ , http://barin.zaadz.com

Emphasis on abstracts is nothing but copying of European painters

In the lap of nature: Finally, there are two veteran painters who speak against the ever rising, unreasonable price tag on the paintings. Just read on as Serbjeet Singh and Vinod Sharma take stock of the art scenario today VETERANS SPEAK Serbjeet Singh and Vinod Sharma paint for passion. Everything else comes later The Hindu Metro Plus DelhiSaturday, Jul 29, 2006

They are both mesmerised by nature in its moment of perfection - a distilled, pristine purity that is fleeting as it is permanent. It beckons to them to reveal its myriad moods in a dance only they can perceive and better still, capture. It then becomes a part of their mind's eye to gush forward in a burst of joyous abandon that takes on an energy that almost spiritual in its manifestation. And yet in this abstraction is a narrative that unfolds in layers of silences.

Alka Raghuvanshi brings together artists Serbjeet Singh and Vinod Sharma whose landscapes bring the outdoors inside in an amazing interplay of light, textures and shadows. Their creative instincts have led both of them to explore the medium of film as well. Serbjeet's charming wit has us in splits as he has a million anecdotes to tell - pity he refuses to write them - of people and their quirks. Affable Vinod's frequent smile lights up his face as he talks about the restlessness that impels him to explore new vistas and traverse the extra mile.

Vinod: When people ask me as to why my focus was on landscapes for nearly four decades, I tell them it is only in India where we have some of the most stunning landscapes that we tend to take for granted - because they are there! Besides, for my love affair with nature to have lasted this long, there must be something in it!

Serbjeet: Exactly! Only in India the genre of doing landscapes is taking a backseat. This contemporary emphasis on abstracts is nothing but copying of European painters of 80 years ago! Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne have all been adopted by the various top Indian painters whose work has not grown beyond these adopted maibaaps! I remember Sanjay Gandhi got very upset with M.F. Husain for portraying his mother Indira negatively dressed!

Vinod: To me, my work is abstraction. When I see your work, I find it totally abstract. I'm not painting a tree like a photograph or even trying to reproduce it. It is a matter of perspective.

Serbjeet: True, it is a bit like Rashomon! It is a matter of your own perspective. There are times when I do white, transparent skies. Because I have trekked 25000 miles myself through the upper reaches of the Himalayas I am able to play with perspectives. I have house in Dalhousie and I would wander off in the mountains in the old British tradition of adventure for yourself - not for setting any records.

Vinod: Same here. I don't photograph landscapes, but try to experience them and then create the textures that my mind saw and my heart remembers. For textures are very important for me - having been a student of printmaking in my initial years. I find the feeling of painting on location totally different from doing it later in the studio. The immediacy has its own context.

Serbjeet: When I was making Himalaya Darshan series of films, it was such an experience to capture on camera what was part of my own mental sketchbook. You know I have made nearly 400 short films! And I will have you know that I got the Edinburgh award five years before Satyajit Ray!

Vinod: I too find film filmmaking very exciting. It is my passion. I once did the art direction of a horror film and loved it! When I am doing a film I want to be in every department - including attending the shooting!

Serbjeet: What is rather heartbreaking is that young artists are not allowed to grow. There is a waiting period of gallery booking for two years!

Vinod: I think there is a stranglehold of a few painters and the monopoly of a few is having a very negative impact on a few painters.

Serbjeet: Just as this current trend of artificially hiked rates of paintings is nothing but money laundering. When the business is of multi-crores, then it is financially unsustainable. Rich men's bored housewives throwing page 3 parties is not how a gallery is run. There are too many layers within it. In the last 10 years or so, painting has become a matter of speculation like stocks and shares. Even if you were to take it at face value, who in India will spend 10 million on a painting? It has to stabilise and then the real prices will emerge.

Vinod: It is nothing but natak baazi. Price rise of 10 to 15 per cent is sustainable. And the current trend of going overboard and raising it 200 per cent is just not sustainable. Even if I were to do it for my work, I'll feel guilty myself! Besides art must be within the reach of the middle classes as it was meant to be. In the long run, it is bad for the art if it is bought for mere investment.

The beauties

‘…Others finished with reincarnations and of a different over all nature, may begin the long journey leading towards the vocation of a creator. On a much different plane this could be compared to geniuses in creative fields within your physical reality. Instead of paints words, musical notes, the creators begin to experiment with dimensions of actuality; imparting knowledge in as many forms as possible-and I do not mean physical forms. What you would call time is manipulated as an artist would manipulate pigment. What you would call space is gathered together in different ways. Art is created, then, using time for example, as a structure. In your terms time and space might be mixed. The beauties of various ages, the natural beauties, the paintings and buildings are all recreated as learning methods for these beginners. One of their main preoccupations is to create beauty that impinges itself in as many various dimensions of reality as possible..’ Session 547 by Jane Roberts

posted by Augustina at 1:03 PM Reflections on practise Sunday, July 23, 2006 sethart.blogspot.com Augustina Location: London, England, United Kingdom ( Sumari/Sumari-Intermediate ) Translations of intensities and primary cordella/archetypal complexes into Art forms. Integral art practise. Depth intimacies within relationships. Focuses further complicated by issues of beauty, sensuality, eros, ritualised sex and pathways of pleasure, beyond to other sensualities including pain but all encoded as Love expressing desire for the masculine. Aesthetics. Mythologies. Psychic structures. Symbolism. Lingistics and word origins.

Geologically made mannequins, a frontier of the Marvelous

Rocks have the incredible ability of being perceived as things they are not. In the inspired mind a simple outcome of erosion can, by chance, match the human figure, creating a fault-line in our patterned, predictable view of the world. Almost a mile south from the city of Bandon, in a remote location off the Oregon coast, is a rock formation that can easily be identified as a woman’s face in profile. Prosaically christened Face Rock by early European settlers, this mimetolith has a richer, more luminous history with the indigenous population. A Coquille Indian tale recounts the fate of Ewauna, the daughter of Chief Siskiyou, who was abducted by the evil spirit of the ocean while out for a midnight swim. Knowing the spirit’s power rest in its gaze, Ewauna defiantly refused to look in its eyes, and was tragically transformed―by the spirit or some other supernatural means it is not clear―into stone.

For evident reasons, the human face and figure are the most frequent images seen in rock formations, and to catalog such convergences of stone and shape would be a perpetual errand. However, the commonality of these apparitions does not spoil their participation in the enchantment of the everyday. Bulging with contradictions, these formations, as geologically made mannequins, obscure the line between the living and the lifeless, and redefine the limits between the hidden and the frankly obvious. If the human imagination has a connection to the natural world it is one we are forced to forget by our rational precepts. But when the repressed reaches out it forges that connection anew, making the earth with its many rocks a frontier of the Marvelous. Brandon Freels Friday, January 20, 2006 Ewuana and Her Kind 4:44 PM Permalink Flying Stone The online bulletin of the Portland Surrealist Group

Surreality in geography

Map reading as a form of interpretive delirium brings us closer to the surreality in geography. Where the Willamette and Columbia rivers meet there becomes visible the tip of a canine nose that eventually gives way to the silhouette of a coyote framed by the two rivers. This image shadows the region, stretching its chest as far south as Oregon City and flattening its ears eastward in the form of the poorly named Government Island. Known for his various adventures along these two rivers it isn’t too far-fetched to see this visual play as a likeness of the mythic Coyote, a mischievous and resourceful personage in the indigenous social fabric. And yet, given that a Colville Indian tale attributes the creation of the Columbia, in an attempt to bring salmon into the region, to Coyote himself, perhaps this image can be seen as an unconscious slip, a kind of fortuitous self-portrait by the territory’s most prolific pleasure seeker. MK Shibek and Brandon Freels The Paranoiac-Critical Coyote Flying Stone Tuesday, March 21, 2006 6:10 PM Permalink

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Sexier shows that stir excitement and draw crowds

Art Rearranged: The Shock of the New and the Comfort of the Old By ALAN RIDING NYTimes.com Homepage: July 22, 2006

PARIS, July 21 — Pity the curator in the age of the blockbuster. While art museums are usually rated by the quality of their permanent collections, it is all too often their temporary shows that stir excitement and draw crowds. Not infrequently, a work of art that is barely noticed while on permanent display is suddenly lionized in a short-term exhibition. One answer is to make the permanent collection seem, well, sexier. And to this end, some leading museums of modern and contemporary art are testing a fresh approach: if collections are frequently rearranged, either by bringing works out of storage or by changing the focus of installations, they can acquire something of the buzz of temporary shows.

“It’s something we talk about a great deal,” said John Elderfield, chief curator of paintings and sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “How does one try to engage people with the collection as much as people seem to be willing to be engaged with temporary exhibitions?” At MoMA, Tate Modern in London and the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, which boast the best 20th-century collections, curators have even given conceptual names to some displays to suggest they are pursuing an innovative intellectual theme rather than simply offering a lesson in art history.

“We have become more like temporary exhibitions,” said Frances Morris, who is in charge of displays at Tate Modern, which has just reinstalled its collection only six years after opening. “Temporary shows have driven the agenda for the last 30 years. It was always in these shows that new ground was being broken. I’d like to think that we are also now being experimental with permanent collections.”

“Collections are not static, so why present them statically?” asked Vicente Todoli, Tate Modern’s director. “When works are always in the same place, people say, ‘Oh, I’ve seen it already.’ You have to encourage visitors to come more than once because, with each visit, the work is viewed differently. You have to surprise and confront the visitor.”

Forgotten awareness of a place felt to be Home

Daniel Brian Holeman Born 8:41 PM Oct. 9, 1952, San Jose, California

Artistic talent combined with life-long exploration of consciousness and devotion to self-realization has given Daniel B. Holeman an ability to depict uplifting and profound sacred imagery. His inspirational paintings have a strong impact and an uncanny affect on people. Many are deeply touched emotionally – sometimes brought to tears - and describe his paintings as the most beautiful pictures they have ever seen.

Daniel feels it is not so much the beauty as the place it stirs in people that they are responding to. He invites the viewer to dive into a deeper dimension of consciousness while viewing his paintings. The imagery stirs forgotten awareness of a place felt to be HOME – a warm, familiar and heartfelt state of mind – a welcome contrast to the day-to-day world we live in. His work has been used on TV and videos, book and CD covers, magazines, prints, posters, cards and the internet. See some samples of published works here.

Self-taught techniques include oil on canvas with airbrush touchup. The mandala works are pen and ink on paper, and then colored on computer. Rather than appealing to select markets, such as "New Age" and "Spiritual", his work appeals to a good percentage of people in all categories - perhaps anyone who appreciates or longs for that heartfelt place - thus crossing race, social, gender, religious and ethnic boundaries.

His paintings and reproductions can be seen and purchased at the InnerSpace Gallery at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. His Web Site, AwakenVisions.com, is a special world to explore and enjoy - a Domain of Beauty, Insight, Transformation and Awakening. In addition to the artwork, Awaken Visions is a haven for truth seekers, consciousness explorers and all who know, don't know, or want to know what it's all about. For more information visit Spiritual Awakening. Born and raised in San Jose, Daniel currently resides in San Rafael, California and is working on a new series of inspiring abstract oil paintings.

Also see Awaken Truth Foundation Also see Daniel's Philosophy The intent of Daniel B. Holeman's artwork is to inspire people to find truth and self-realization.Daniel is also available to give talks, teachings and presentations about Awakening,Liberation as well as the artwork and what it is about. Inquire by email.

They nevertheless deserved to be admired

Pilgrimage to an art temple in Amsterdam Sudheendra Kulkarni Indian Express : Sunday, June 04, 2006

During my school years in a small town in Karnataka, I worked as a volunteer in a public library after school hours. It was my earliest introduction to the world of books. Kannada being my mother tongue, and also the medium of study, most of the books I read were from the rich treasure of Kannada literature. And nobody had so much of a mind-expanding influence on me as Shivram Karanth, a multi-faceted literary personality and later a Jnanpith laureate. As I write these lines from Amsterdam, after spending a whole day at the Van Gogh Museum, one book of Karanth that I recall is his travelogue titled Apoorva Paschim (The Unique West).

I have been revisiting it in my mind repeatedly after visiting the Vatican Museum in Rome, the Louvre, Versailles and Rodin Museum in Paris and countless manifestations of art in the monuments and buildings during my extended stay in Europe. In this book, Karanth describes the artistic and cultural heritage of Europe with unrestrained admiration. He was especially impressed by how European countries tried to preserve their heritage during the two catastrophic World Wars. Apart from kindling my imagination about the beauty of distant Europe, what Karanth did was make me understand an important truth: even though one may dislike the West’s colonial powers for what they did to countries like India, they nevertheless deserved to be admired for all that was good and noble in them.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) is one of Europe’s many noble gifts to mankind. His name had left no impression on me in my school days. But he was to be a major discovery in my rebellious growing-up years in college—and the discovery has not ended yet. I never tried my hand at art, but like most young people radicalised by socialist ideals, I was gripped by questions—and answers—about art’s place in life, and its impact on society and politics. And Van Gogh, though he never advocated any ideology, became an inspiration to raise these questions and find answers.

What drew me to him was the book Lust for Life, based on hundreds of letter that Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, who was both his benefactor and his unsuccessful art dealer. In my solitary hours, I experienced an indescribable connectedness with his paintings. This befriending of the Dutch artist created an intense desire to see the famous Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which houses the largest collection of his paintings (over 200), drawings and his letters. Hence, last week’s visit was in some ways a pilgrimage to a temple of art.

The use of the word ‘temple’ is deliberate. Van Gogh’s art is spiritual. If prayer or worship means a way of reverential reaching out to the Higher Power that has created this universe, and whose inter-connected attributes have been described by Indian rishis as ‘‘Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram’’ (Truth, Divnity, Beauty), then Van Gogh’s paintings have the power to draw the viewer into a spiritual journey. (He writes in a letter to Theo, ‘‘A feeling, even a keen one, for the beauties of nature is not the same thing as a religious feeling, though I think these stand in close relation to one another.’’)

Maybe the beauty of his paintings lies in the power of his colours, or in his almost disorderly brushstroke which has got uniquely identified with him. But the more you watch, the more you realise that it is not any external aspect that has drawn you in. Rather, it is the purity and sublime nature of his art. It is his love for life, but also his agonies in life. It is his paintings’ ability to make us aware of how our own existence and the society we live in have lost the self-elevating harmony with nature, and how this could be at the root of much of our sorrow, our unhappiness with ourselves, our conflicts and our dehumanisation.

For an artist who posthumously became almost a cult figure in the art world, Van Gogh lived a life of poverty, neglect and, in his later years, ill-health. This partly explains his compassion for and solidarity with the poor. He found that honesty and true religious values were more deeply rooted in peasants and workers than in ‘‘the civilised people in cities’’. One of his famous paintings is Potato Eaters, about which he writes to his brother, ‘‘...I have tried to emphasise that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food.’’

The Peasants’ Churchyard, another prized work in the museum, shows a rural church in ruins (perhaps Van Gogh’s way of bemoaning the decline of Christianity in Europe) surrounded by a graveyard bearing crosses. ‘‘I wanted to express,’’ he writes in another letter to his brother, ‘‘how these ruins show that for ages peasants have been laid to rest in the very fields which they dug up when alive. I wanted to express what a simple thing death and burial is, just as simple as the falling of autumn leaf—just a bit of earth dug up, a wooden cross...And now these ruins tell me how a faith and a religion mouldered away—strongly founded though they were—but how the life and death of the peasants forever remain the same...Religions pass away, God remains.’’

Sorrow and death are recurring themes in Van Gogh, just as serene tranquillity and springtime renewal of life are. The blue sky he painted has the soothing effect of a mother’s or a lover’s hand. At other times, it is transformed into the tempestuous swirling of clouds and stars. In each case, it mirrors infinity, and the artist’s search for the mystery of transient human existence.
Institutionalised religion troubled Van Gogh. But the life of Christ remained his ideal. To a fellow painter he writes: ‘‘Christ alone—of all the philosphers—has affirmed, as a principled certainty, eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death, the necessity and raison d’etre of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as a greater artist than all other artists, despising marble and clay as well as colour, working in living flesh.’’

In the world of art today, the meaning and magic of art are often obscured by constant money talk. The legacy that Van Gogh has left, however, cannot be measured by the tens of millions of dollars that each of his paintings fetch—and there are very few that get sold at all. Rather it is to be measured by the love and popular acclaim that he has won all over the world, by the good feelings and good thoughts that he sows among generation after generation of art lovers. No wonder, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam attracts more than a million visitors each year. ‘‘My need to serve the people, arising from a religious calling, has now become a strong desire to leave a certain souvenir to humankind in the form of drawings and paintings,’’ he wrote in one of his letters, two years before he shot himself.

As I came out of the beautifully designed museum, with a bagful of Van Gogh souvenirs purchased at the gift shop, my eyes were drawn to a line, engraved in large letters in dozens of different languages, at the entrance. It read: ‘‘Go to the museum as often as you can—Van Gogh, 1883.’’ To me it meant, ‘‘Go to Temples of Art as often as you can.’’ write to sudheen.kulkarni@expressindia.com editor@expressindia.com

Originality plus technique

Choosing art of the future Suneet Chopra The Financial Express Sunday , July 02, 2006

When we talk of the market, we are merely talking of signposts that give one an inkling of the art of the future, Today’s signposts are the Rs 1 crore-plus artists like MF Husain, SH Raza, FN Souza, VS Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta and Akbar Padamsee. I have chosen this sequence of names primarily because they belong to the same trend and were members of the Bombay Group as well as of the Progressive Artists Group.

The essence of their success was that they were “progressives.” That means they were committed to creating an art that represented a break with that of our colonial past or with revivalist art. They saw themselves as the path-breakers of the future and made common cause with other artists who were like-minded. But the Bombay Group based in Mumbai was not the only such group. There were progressive artists in Kolkata like Somnath Hore, Paritosh Sen, Nirode Majumdar and Rathin Moitra. In Tamil Nadu one had artists like KCS Panicker and Haridasan. In Srinagar too, SH Raza founded a group out of which the artist GR Santosh emerged.

Not all of these artists command the market as the luminaries of the Bombay group do. Nor do all artists of the Bombay group command the same high prices. Both Ara and Bakre are examples of this. So, while being a “progressive” artist has its plus points, there is more to successful art than that. Artists who are original fare better than those who are not. So when a collector chooses a work of a particular artist, he or she must see if the work marks a break from the artist’s general body of work and not merely representative of it.

It is this originality of approach that marks out artists like VS Gaitonde and Akbar Padamsee, especially the non-figurative works of both of them. In the same way, both Raza and Santosh evolved a break from our traditional “tantric” art and brought its symbolism forward in a modernist frame. Artists like Tyeb Mehta and FN Souza, apart from their progressive and original credentials, were also masters of technique. And this shows in their work. That is why their art survived the past and is likely to go into the future.

When we look at younger artists today. We have to evaluate their capacity to come to terms with the changing world and look beyond it. We must look at their capacity to handle technique and their success in breaking away from the past without resorting to copying Western avant-garde, contemporary or post modernist art. Their tryist with the future must be theirs and no one else’s. I am purposely not naming names here. I expect art lovers to internlise the rules of thumb outlined above and do the exercise for themselves. The experience ought to be rewarding.