I returned to this set of nine sonnets, 69-77, this fall — during the run-up to the US election amidst the rage of global pandemic…  a context so different from five years ago, when I first “completed” this set… 

When I began this series, I knew it would take a long time, but I couldn’t quite imagine it would be that long — nor how much the world would change… And although I decided to follow the sequence in its traditional order, from 1 to 154, I knew that this path cannot be neat and linear, and I would return to the earlier sonnets again (and again, and again).

In the painting process, the sonnets started to split themselves into these subsets — chapters, or “collages”, nine or sixteen paintings each. And I accepted this unexpected development, in all its perceived “randomness” — because these “chapters” made sense, revealed new emergent meanings, created some sort of a meta-container for this ever-puzzling sequence. 

But what is a unifying meta-meaning here, in this chapter (69-77)? 

Death — the premonition of one’s death, the twilight of life — is in the very heart of it (sonnets 71-74), but it is surrounded by seemingly unrelated contemplations of praise, slander, shame, love, and more…

Why? Is there any sense in pushing these sonnets together, into one painting? 

This question has been playing games with my mind these two months — appearing and disappearing from my view. One day, absolutely clear — and seemingly non-existent the next morning.

And, unsurprisingly, the painting — this nine-sonnet “meta-painting” — was struggling: one day, a glimpse of unity and harmony would seem to emerge, only to fall apart again into nine individual paintings, which didn’t quite know what they are doing here together… 

This unifying theme is as elusive as our sense of self — beyond the experience of being a body,  beyond outward appearances — because this mysterious (and maybe even illusory) sense of self is this theme.

So many words we use to point to this experience — mind, soul, spirit… so many places where we try to find it, from the interior world of one’s own consciousness to the myriad reflections in other people’s thoughts and memories, in their praise and in their slander, and in the imprints we leave in the world — in deeds, and words, and art.    

Here is an audio excerpt from this conversation (the questions and answers section was not recorded, to allow for a freer flow of the conversation). And below, you can read a (somewhat more crystallised) write-up of the same content.

Our conversation begins at a crucial juncture in the story of our lives, a fork in humanity’s evolution.

We have received the biggest wake-up call so far, and it is also our greatest chance.

A rude awakening. A great disruption. A global pause.

Our chance to pause and look at ourselves — individually and collectively, each of us alone — and all of us together. And there is no subtler mirror — nor more sublime — than the infinitely puzzling sequence of Shakespeare sonnets…

Shall we look at our story, the story of humanity, as a mythological hero’s journey?

This gaudy hero, galloping into the future on his white horse — and suddenly, he sees an old, frail woman by the side of the road. He is given a choice: to continue his journey, which seems so important — or to stop, and to help. Almost in spite of himself, he stops — surprised by his own choice. And this is what saves him — because he was galloping towards an inevitable self-destruction.

That’s what just happened in our collective story: as a collective, we decided to risk our economic well-being for the sake of the old, the frail, the weak. In the fog of rising fears and anxieties, it is easy to lose the scale of this event. But in the grand scheme of things, it is on a par with what happened just a few centuries ago, at about Shakespeare’s time — when the humanity suddenly decided that slavery is not OK anymore.

It has been a very special leg in the evolutionary story of humanity, these four centuries separating us from Shakespeare. For the first time, the individual human mind claimed the power to run the human life — beyond the predetermined social roles and routines and rules. This is the power of individual choice — that’s why Shakespeare could be a poet and a playwright — and not a glover, like his father.

Now, we are looking back at the mind’s journey — and what happens next is up to us. There are many challenges ahead, and what we need to face them is an open heart and a clear mind.

That’s where Shakespeare is going to help us.

In poetry, language — the mind’s main medium of being — works differently.

In fact, it doesn’t “work” at all, but rather — lives: as an ocean of semantic waves, which can transmute and transform the neural machinery of the mind, creating new and powerful connections, tapping into the deepest recesses of memory. And even the occasional obscurity of Shakespeare’s language can help us here — because these poems aren’t supposed to be “understood”, not in the usual sense of the word, and so we can just allow the mind to be puzzled, to not know, to un-know — and simply swim in these semantic waves.

Shakespeare the playwright is unbelievably, unimaginably god-like. This universal mind, which envisions, creates, and contains so many strikingly different humans: Juliet and King Lear, Othello and Hamlet… and each living their own story, and it is at the interface between a human being and a story line that the drama of life plays itself out. Just imagine Othello and Hamlet exchanging stories:

Othello getting even the slightest hint that his uncle the king is a treacherous murderer — no problem, just go kill the king and become the next king… no drama, no tragedy at all. And vice versa: what would Hamlet do in Othello’s shoes? What he does best: think, hesitate, look for evidence…. No drama, no tragedy, and Desdemona lives…

Shakespeare the playwright is always behind the scenes, creating human beings and their stories, their slices of suffering — with compassion, but also with detachment. This universal mind is just a container, a space: never on the frontline of human experience; everyone, and no-one.

But the “I” of the sonnets is utterly different and painfully human.

Suddenly, this universal mind is utterly caught up in the human drama, trapped by his own story of love, suffering, and betrayal. Here, we see Shakespeare on the frontline of human experience — as vulnerable, and (occasionally) as absurdly stupid — as any one of us.

There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently.

But the “I” of the sonnet and the author of the sonnet aren’t exactly the same “self” either, and so the sonnet allows you to move fluidly between these layers of selfhood — from the one who acts, and lives, and suffers — to the one who tries to observe, and make sense of it all — to the one who composes the story, the playwright of your own drama.

Like a powerful mirror, they allow us to see in ourselves what we cannot see otherwise. And in seeing, there is a potential for liberation.

Many years ago, my personal journey lead me into a space quite similar to where we find ourselves now, as a collective, as the whole of humanity.

My life as I had know it suddenly stopped, and I was lost, drowning in the mess (which I brought upon myself). In this dark forest of my life, I returned to the dream of my childhood — painting — and then, seven years later, this path brought me to Shakespeare’s sonnets — to the idea of painting the sonnets.

Painting the sonnets meant, for me, living them — fusing my moment-to-moment visual experiences with the journey of the sonnets. And this process transformed my life beyond anything my mind could have ever conceived. It completely deconstructed my old “reality”. It liberated my mind from its many blinders and filters, and cleansed my doors of perception.

But the drama of the sonnets (as they are usually interpreted) — the older man, the younger man, the dark lady; the lust, the betrayals, the love triangles… this drama has always been alien to me as a person. My life’s melodrama is completely different (just like Hamlet’s drama is different from Othello’s)…

What attracted me to them (and at first, this happened beyond my conscious awareness), and what gradually grew clearer and clearer as I was painting them — exists on a completely different, deeper level, hidden behind the maya of this drama. What this mirror revealed to me is a kind of transmission, a transmission across time and space, and as urgently relevant now as it ever has been.

As I was painting, the sonnets sequence started to split itself into “chapters”, corresponding to what I think of as paradoxes of human condition. And the first chapter (sonnets 1-9) is the “Paradox of Self”: thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel… And this is where I suggest we start, one sonnet at a time — beginning with the first sonnet on Sunday, March 29th 2020 (10AM Pacific time).

Since the language of sonnets can be obscure, and this may feel like an obstacle, here are some ways to find your personal connection with a sonnet.

The first “tip” comes to Marina Tsvetaeva, a tragic Russian poet of the last century.

She once said that, in each poem, a couple of lines come from God, and the rest is just a human composing a context for them. In Shakespeare’s case, it may well be that the whole sonnet came from God, but nonetheless: in every sonnet, there will be a line or two that will resonate with you even if the rest is completely incomprehensible. This is your best point of connection. (For example, my point of connection to Sonnet 1 was “making a famine where abundance lies — thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel”).

Another possibility is to experiment with different perspectives:

Does the sonnet “read” better if you identify with its “I”, or with its “thou”? Or maybe it is better read “in the third person”, as an outside observer? Again, for me, the first sonnet really came alive when I started reading it as addressed to myself — as though I, or even to the whole of modern humankind (and not some imaginary young man) were the “thou” of the sonnet, making a famine where abundance lies.

Sonnets are filled with metaphors — the same pattern, the same phenomenon manifested and seen in different ways, in different contexts. And it is often useful just to take these metaphors literally — so that, to continue with the same example: what if it is really about making a famine where abundance lies? What if, in our gluttony, we literally “eat” the world?

And last but not least, I also offer you my visual responses, painting translations of the sonnets, as another possible point of connection. Here, to begin with is the first sonnet painting (and below, is the text and the audio of the first sonnet).

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:

But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.

Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

The tree of life is just outside… “

— this sentence emerged in my mind simply as a painting suggestion. It happens sometimes in the painting process — a thought pattern, an inner verbal gesture, which is perceived as subtle guidance (not a deliberate decision).

I was feeling my way into a new painting, a painting quite unlike anything I had done before.

(So new is this painting that it is not willing to be shared, not yet. It still needs to stay in the space of my aloneness, away from the public eye, from the relentless pull of social media…. Just this detail.)

There was a place for the tree of life in this painting — the mythical tree from the Garden of Eden. The insight was that I can paint this tree from life, just looking out of my studio window: the tree of life is just outside.

And that’s what I did — but the sentence kept playing itself in my mind, returning again and again, as though there were something else it was pointing to, something else to see and comprehend.

“The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life” — Lord Byron

The tree-of-life story has been living in my mind for many years, and I always believed it to be a collective, shared story, known to all. But although there is a multitude of tree-of-life stories in the collective memory, yet neither of them seem to coincide with mine, not precisely.

I must have picked up the seed of this story in the eclectic cultural background of my childhood, conflating bits and pieces from Judaic, Eastern Orthodox and Greek stories and tropes. And it has been evolving ever since, barely rising above the threshold of my conscious awareness — until it brought me to this painting, and to the tree just outside my studio window.

There are, of course, two trees in this story — the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life: from the original state of primal innocence, a fruit from the Tree of Knowledge makes you truly human, and a fruit from the Tree of Life, divine.

Both trees are forbidden to Adam and Eve, so eating an apple is an act of freedom and heroic defiance (I never paid much attention to the snake, it didn’t seem significant): not only have they tasted a fruit from a forbidden tree, but they choose humanity over divinity, knowledge over immortality (just like Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods).

And so begins the story of humanity, the story of suffering and self-reliance, the story of freedom and separation, and the insatiable desire to comprehend everything.

Freedom beyond choices

I have never doubted the wisdom of this original choice… For one thing, who would want to turn into someone who forbids knowledge to others? But more than that, there is no freedom without choices… or is there?

It feels as though this is what this sentence, “the tree of life is just outside”, points me to, a state of freedom beyond choices… As though both trees are always here, and you don’t have to choose one to be free. It reminds me of what Giordano Bruno once wrote, so many years ago (and yet so recently, in the grand scheme of things):

The world is fine as it is… We have the knowledge not to search for divinity removed from us if we have it near; it is within us more than we ourselves are.”

The tree of life is just outside…

— I heard this in a business course the other day.

But is it true?

What about eternity?

An abstract concept, living in the mind, with no grounding in sensory reality — except this longing in the human heart, which no abstract concept can invoke…

Alan Lightman writes:

To my mind, it is one of the profound contradictions of human existence that we long for immortality, indeed fervently believe that something must be unchanging and permanent, when all of the evidence in nature argues against us. I certainly have such a longing. Either I am delusional, or nature is incomplete. […] Despite all the richness of the physical world — the majestic architecture of atoms, the rhythm of the tides, the luminescence of the galaxies—nature is missing something even more exquisite and grand: some immortal substance, which lies hidden from view.”

Alan Lightman, “The accidental universe: the world you thought you knew”

Hidden from view… but is it?

I painted this lemon on two consecutive days this week, at different times of day. Can you see that the two lemons in the painting belong to different moments in time? Here is a better photo:

What happened to these moments when they re-emerged in the painting?

Is there Time in painting?

Art is a shortcut to Eternity

— this was my mind’s staircase response to the first conversation in our “Art and Consciousness Circle”.

It seems so obvious in retrospect… Haven’t I always known this — that this is what it is all about? But somehow, I made myself forget — and keep forgetting.

In January, we talked about Kandinsky’s “three mystical elements” of artist’s inner necessity — this ever-present inner impulse that calls us to work.

The three elements, according to Kandinsky, are:

• the artist’s personality (self-expression)
• the spirit of the age (the element of “style”), and
• “the element of pure artistry, which is constant in all ages and among all nationalities”, “an expression of the eternal artistry”

Kandinsky calls the first two elements “subjective”, and the last one, “objective” (words which seem to become more confusing with every usage)…

There is an implied hierarchy here, which made us all uneasy — especially because Kandinsky writes:

“A full understanding of the first two elements is necessary for a realization of the third…”

Wassily Kandinsky, “Concerning the spiritual in Art”.

Does he mean that our only path to the eternal lies through the transient, through the forms and styles of our age and our culture?

I don’t think so, because a bit later, he writes:

The inevitable desire for outward expression of the objective element is the impulse here defined as the “inner need.”

… thus placing the eternal firmly within an individual human being. Eternity’s hostage imprisoned by Time, in Boris Pasternak’s timeless words.

“Beyond all date, even to eternity… “

— this is from Shakespeare’s sonnet 122, the sonnet I started translating into colour this month. And he continues:

Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist …”

There was a time, in the unfolding of the sonnets sequence, when this tension — between the idea of eternity and the mortality of human vessels of this idea — was unbearably painful to him.

But now, the verse glides from one to another as though there were no space in between — easily, effortlessly. Or simpler still:

as though the poet were the space that holds them both (as he does)… and that is enough.

A shortcut to eternity — this is what my strange and weirdly personal relationship with Shakespeare really is…

When you feel a deep inner resonance with a work of art from another age, beyond the trappings of style and personality, it is Kandinsky’s “third mystical element”, the “objective”, the eternal, revealing itself to you across time and space.

Far from being “hidden from view”, it does all it can to make itself seen and felt… the rest is up to us.

Kandinsky writes about this, too:

An Egyptian carving speaks to us today more subtly than it did to its chronological contemporaries; for they judged it with the hampering knowledge of period and personality. But we can judge purely as an expression of the eternal artistry.”

A child of my knowledge-hungry age, I cannot always resist the temptation to enfold Shakespeare in whatever hampering historical knowledge I can find (did you know, by the way, that in Shakespeare’s English, art and heart were indistinguishable in pronunciation?)

But perhaps Kandinsky is right: this is not how this connection really happens.

Or so it would seem: I was simply sitting at my desk, working out my plans for the year… I had opened this file, “Blueprint 2020”, with a palpable sense of clarity: I knew exactly what I was going to do. It was simply a matter of writing it all down, putting it all together.

Admittedly, there are — as always — quite a lot of things I am planning, but I am accustomed to that, and I even saw, in my mind’s eye, how all these projects can be integrated together into a beautiful, unified flow — no reason to panic at all.

— and suddenly, seemingly out of the blue: this sensation of overwhelming chaos emerging, right in front of my eyes, from the seeming clarity of my plans.

Chaos/Tidy up

As a girl, I once noticed that my mother’s little notebook, where she kept her “to-do” lists, contained two recurrent entries. Every day, she would begin her “to-do” list with two items:

1. Chaos
2. Tidy up

She herself never saw the irony in this, because her “chaos” referred to the mathematical problem she was working on, and “tidy up” — well, it was simply her day-to-day fight with the household chaos generated by our little family.

I often recall this daily rhythm of chaos/tidy-up, because it keeps recreating itself in my own life.

But this time, something unusual was happening: an overwhelming chaos erupting right in the midst of “tidying up”, of simply writing down my already clear plans.

Luckily, I had the opportunity to talk this through in our small mastermind group (which was conveniently scheduled in advance to almost coincide with this moment of panic — a totally unplanned miracle of synchronicity ). This is what allowed me to pinpoint exactly when the sensation of chaos emerged, and what I did to generate it…

The thing is, I lived the first thirty five years of my life without any “goal-setting” whatsoever.

It might have seemed “from the outside” as though I did have goals, because some fairly long-term projects were completed in this time (books, dissertations, field trips, moving house…), but in truth, I had none.

In retrospect, I think there were two reasons why I didn’t need any goal-setting back then.

First, all my projects emerged naturally from who I was at the time; and if they involved some learning and some growth, it was continuous, organic, predictable. No leaps, no discontinuities.

And — probably even more importantly — all these projects were naturally entrained into a larger flow of life. My whole life was like a river following a predictable course through its native terrain.

But at thirty five, I found myself completely disconnected from this familiar flow. (It was a conscious decision — I just didn’t fully realise its consequences in advance.)

Suddenly, I was in the midst of an ocean, and there were no familiar stars to chart my course — and I didn’t even know where I wanted to sail…

That’s when, after a momentary confusion, I started to explore the whole “goal-setting” thing, in its different variations, models, modalities, and frameworks. And what keeps appearing in (almost) all of them is time: the idea that a goal has to be linked to a temporal signpost, projected onto a specific point in the future.

And this is exactly what engendered my experience of chaos suddenly erupting out of nowhere: it happened precisely when I tried to link all my projects to a single point in imaginary future.

It doesn’t even mean I imagined all of them completed by this point: all I was trying to do is to create some “benchmarks” for them… and yet, this arbitrary deadline was like a dam blocking their (yet unknown) natural flow, all at the same time.

I cannot count how many times I have recreated this pattern for myself in real life: arbitrary deadlines to create arbitrary expectations and equally arbitrary constrictions in the natural flow of events. (My favourite way to feed the addictive habit of being disappointed in myself.)

This week, though, it all happened within a single moment of presence — I sensed the chaos I was projecting into my own future, before it actually happened.

Boris Pasternak once wrote that an artist is an “eternity’s hostage, imprisoned by time”.

But here, I was the one locking myself up in this prison of time — and all I had to do to get out is to accept that I simply don’t know the natural time frame for my projects… and to let go of the idea that a project cannot be completed unless it is willfully locked into an imaginary time.

This story begins and ends with forgiveness.

(But before forgiveness, there are sins, and guilt, and shame, and offences, real or imaginary, and hurts — all wrapped together in a ball of pain, all but impossible to disentangle. Unless there is Art to transform and transmute them with its gentle touch.)

The day before, I was reminded of a simple night-time practice of forgiveness. Just tell yourself, as you are falling asleep:

I forgive everyone who has ever hurt me, including myself.

(Ultimately, isn’t all forgiveness about forgiving oneself?)

So that’s what I did… releasing, layer by layer, all the hurts and sins of this lifetime, and this penchant for punishing and torturing myself by rehearsing them again and again. Going deeper and deeper into the story of my life, into the early childhood (where Russian tentatively replaced English in the mantra I was repeating), I fell asleep.

But later in the night, half-awake again — I saw, in my mind’s eye, the spacious interior of Sagrada Familia, the Holy Family Basilica in Barcelona.

Boundless space

A strange, unique building, envisioned and begun by Antoni Gaudí, but still being constructed, across five generations of architects, artists, builders. The last cathedral of humanity…

So utterly chaotic its outer expression: it’s all organic growth, a chaos of images, shapes and forms — surrounding and hiding the light and spaciousness of its interior.

In this church, all the stories usually illustrated within Catholic temples have been pushed out from the interior, crowding and overwhelming its four facades.

The interior is almost empty, but it is a special kind of interconnected, delicately structured emptiness, in love with its own inner structure, constantly re-creating itself in visual experience.

Its boundaries are non-boundaries — they are themselves spaces, just slightly denser, slightly more structured: more intricate, smaller spaces — stairs, passages, galleries. The boundaries of the inner space are outlined, hinted at — but not experienced.

The walls of the church are invisible from within: like these sequences of ever-diminishing numbers (as in 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16… ), always approaching zero, but never coinciding with it: we know the limit is there, but it is also not there — so does the inner space of Sagrada Familia approach its outer limits.

Let him go…

All the stories have been pushed outside, I said, but there is one exception: the Crucifixion, the tortured figure of Jesus Christ hanging in the centre…

Seeing it all again, in my half-dream, half-awake state, I knew that this is the guilt, and the sin, and the (self)-resentment — the (self)-torturing mind right in the centre of its own inner space, surrounded by the fifty lights of Pentecost, with the triangle of Holy Spirit directed towards it from above.

I knew that all I need to do is just release Christ from there, just let him go — and so I did …

(you can do anything in a dream).

But something was missing, something had to be there, at the core, in the centre of this empty space.

It came to me a few moments later: it has to be a crystal, a reflective, multidimensional glass, multiplying the space manyfold, making it truly infinite, fully fusing the inner and the outer.

And with this realisation, I fell asleep again.

Next morning, I reread my journal from Barcelona and was surprised to see that our first visit to the Sagrada Familia was also preceded by a deep inner experience of forgiveness — but at the time, I didn’t connect these two experiences at all….

Vertigo of synergistic seeing

When I first entered the Sagrada Familia, back in May, I discovered that I was physically incapable of even being within its inner space. It was a vertigo-like, almost unbearable sensation — so we left very soon.

I was tempted to simply reject this experience, and this architecture — to move away, to forget it altogether, even if I knew that it won’t work, and that it is foolish and ultimately impossible to simply reject such a powerful experience.

In Art and Human Consciousness, Gottfried Richter writes about the evolution of architectural spaces as an outer expression of the evolution of consciousness, of the inner experience of being human.

But they are more than just an expression, because architectural spaces can also transform the inner spaces of individual humans who enter them — and thus replicate a newly emerging experience of self, a new stage in the evolution of consciousness. This is the phenomenon of synergistic seeing.

And this is what happened to me in Barcelona, I think: in the aftermath of this first visit, I felt a shift in my experience of self, in my inner space. More precisely, in what was perceived as being inside and outside of Self.

The point of view — my core perspective — was still very much anchored to the body, to the interior space of the body, but more loosely than it used to: it was as though the perceiving I-AM were not firmly within, just behind my eyes, but had moved slightly outside the familiar boundaries of the physical body.

It was as though the perceived outer world were Self, the outer regions of Self — and the interior, just an empty space, filled with connection to the depth.

This, I knew, was the experience of Sagrada Familia. The powerful newness of it caused my vertigo when I first entered it. When we went there again, a few days later, there was no vertigo anymore.

The healing of the wound

Just as I had to go to Sagrada Familia again to complete the transformation, so my Sagrada Familia semi-dream returned again, several days later.

This time, it started as a vision of human faces, fluid, transforming one into another, all-as-one. The faces were all structurally similar to mine and my father’s, and all variations in between. Only faces, looking out from the darkness and disappearing again.

This wasn’t a new experience — I have seen it, and even painted it, before. But this time, it was as though Christ were somehow present in these faces. And as I accustomed myself to this strange, wordless experience, I felt this presence entering right into the centre of my body — through my chest.

I knew this was the final gift of Sagrada Familia — and that it couldn’t have happened while there was still torture and suffering in the centre of its interior, and in the core of my inner space.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

And here are some more sunflowers to bring the light and warmth of summer (and love!) to this winter day…

At this point, there is always something you have to let go of, something to say farewell to, so as to make space for the new.

There is this special state of being, at the edge between the past and the emerging future, between the familiar and the unknown… and it can be both scary and exciting…

To me, this state is akin to the edge between the ocean and the shore: the solid ground of the familiar and the mighty, vast, and perhaps dangerous unknown.

This tree at the edge, near Santa Cruz: I painted it many times. And it was the first ever tree that gifted me with this absolutely extraordinary sensation of unity: painting it meant being it. This is how I feel at the edge between the past and the future, just before letting go of something: almost dissolving into the vast unknown, and yet attached to the ground.

To review all steps of the “Ever-Present Inspiration” process, click here.

All paintings from this post are available as a part of “Living Art Collection. Paintings from the “Living Art” collection are offered throughout this Holiday season (December 31, 2019) with free world-wide shipping, plus one year free membership in Living Art Circle, an online community space designed to integrate the magnificent Art of the past into the presence of our lived experience.

If you would like to be the first to know when “Living Art” opens (and this will include some very special gifts from me), please leave your email below to join the waitlist:

For me, this field is Art, art as a whole, across space and time, experienced as a living, evolving being…

From this vantage point, my own “self”: my sensory experiences, my thoughts, my emotions, my memories are but raw materials for this grand process of evolution. And inspiration comes from connecting them with what is already present, already manifested and expressed. The most difficult part here (for me at least) is not to shy away from anything that emerges, however outlandish and weird it may seem… 

And then, van Gogh’s irises suddenly start blooming at a nearby winery… 

And Chagall’s muse and Shakespeare’s muse reveal themselves to be one and the same being…

And Rainer Maria Rilke emerges out of Cezanne’s mountain… 

And van Gogh’s urgently vibrating colours long to merge with Cezanne’s multi-dimensional space… 

And all I can do, is listen, and surrender to all that emerges, and paint it.

To review all steps of the “Ever-Present Inspiration” process, click here.

Paintings from the “Living Art” collection are offered throughout this Holiday season (December 31, 2019) with free world-wide shipping, plus one year free membership in Living Art Circle, an online community space designed to integrate the magnificent Art of the past into the presence of our lived experience.

If you would like to be the first to know when “Living Art” opens (and this will include some very special gifts from me), please leave your email below to join the waitlist:

You are Eternity’s hostage, imprisoned by Time.”

And this prison, I find, is of our own making.

We construct the wheel of time with the power of our minds, and keep ourselves in captivity, always trying to outrun it, hamster-like… and succeeding only in keeping ourselves out of touch with the ever-present field of inspiration.

But we are always free to step out of this wheel…

I caught this inner gesture of stepping out of the wheel of time accidentally several years ago, while painting this seascape in the Timber Cave, on the Pacific Ocean.

Ocean waves glide towards the shore in a slow rhythm, one after another, measuring the time like an ancient, gently murmuring clock. But there is an even grander, even slower rhythm, which looks like a frozen, immovable present to the human eye.

Here and now, it seems that the shore gives shapes to the waves, yet in the grand scheme of things, it’s the other way round: the curves of the high shore have been shaped by the Pacific ocean over eons of the steady beat of waves.

And the most transient rhythm of all — and most fleetingly picturesque — is the rise and fall of sea foam, its glistering fireworks erupting at the meeting point of water and earth, and disappearing in a matter of seconds.

While painting, I saw these rhythms simultaneously, as parts of multidimensional sensory symphony — and suddenly, miraculously, I became aware that I had somehow stepped out of the wheel of time… that the whole painting process was happening from a space outside of time.

Since that day, I return to the ocean whenever I feel myself caught up in Time’s captivity again, out of touch with the timeless still point within myself.. And it has become a tradition for us to meet every new year on the shore, away from the usual noise of life and flow of time, in the presence of the ever-present beat of its waves.

Two years ago, I captured this still point at the turn of the year in two paintings, the sunset on the last day of 2017…

And the sunrise on the first day of 2018…

And for Shakespeare, in the sonnet series, Time is a pitiless enemy, a relentless destroyer of all that is good and beautiful… But in sonnet 56, he writes:

Let this sad interim like the ocean be
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that, when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view;

And in this comparison, Time transforms into a friend: it may keep the lovers apart, but it also connects…

Paintings from the “Living Art” collection are offered throughout this Holiday season (December 31, 2019) at 20% off the regular gallery price, with free world-wide shipping, and one year free membership in Living Art Circle, an online community space designed to integrate the magnificent Art of the past into the presence of our lived experience.

If you would like to be the first to know when “Living Art” opens (and this will include some very special gifts from me), please leave your email below to join the waitlist: