VINCENT VAN GOGH  –  THE STARRY NIGHT

Van Gogh was a man of poetry among the zen masters, painters, poets, composers, all who live with a poetic grasp of life. He revealed an ecstatic nature and existence in love and at play with itself. Poetry is a literary form of art using language for it’s aesthetic and evocative qualities but it is also a way of seeing life and the world. A child loves to play and a child must play. Play is a fascinating word. If we look deeply into it it represents the whole energy and movement of life. Everything is playing with what it is. The trees sway, birds fly about, flowers open and close, the sun shines, the wind blows, Animals move about and man is in a constant play of being what he is. he may forget he is playing but it is precisely the same play as a child, the toys have simply changed. Now the objects of play are not important, they represent the richness of life’s possibilities. What is important is the play because that is what all of life is. Poetry is an immensely deep and profound understanding of life, it is aware of the nature of existence as play. Those trees have swayed for millions of years and yet every time it is different, there is no code no program and that is true for man, he is free to create, name and move in any direction. When we forget the play our seriousness makes us ridged and moves against our own nature and creates illness. Ninad

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THE STARRY NIGHT  | Japanese pigments on paper |  looking up at the stars is every child’s delight. Thats when we see the world as magic and wonder. That world never goes away but we forget it is there calling us to look up and remember from where we came.

These drawings were among my first apprehensions of the hidden energies behind the apparent forms of nature. They appeared suddenly without any prior imagination simply dictated through drawing without any thought. I was living in Amsterdam, Holland and painting outside each day and as it seemed out of necessity produced many of these drawings. I discovered If we follow our intuition through something it can lead to very surprising revelations that come from outside our subjective self. What is known is our subjectivity but the greater reality floats in the vastness of the unknown. And the unknown is not simply what is unseen but even more that which is yet to be created. Now that is the immense potential of art to reveal the otherwise formless energies that fill our mysterious space. These drawings were later exhibited in the UMA Salon of 1975 at the Stedelijk  Museum in Amsterdam. Ninad

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Revolving Mandala  | acrylic on canvas |

The evolution of abstract Art can be attributed to many factors both social and philosophical but greater than these is it’s spiritual impetus. Insofar as talent, drive, the profundity and depth of the artist, craft and commitment there is absolutely no difference between figurative and abstract artists. From Heronimus Bosh to Vermeer to Van Gogh do not display greater ability than Pollack, De Kooning, Gorky. The beauty and depth of the paintings carry the same value. The emergence of abstraction in art is an expression of a universal alteration in the psyche of humanity. Man is moving toward freedom in every aspect of life. That movement is irrevocable. It is inherent in nature.  Greater freedom means greater movement both inward and outward. Nature stands in the center and allows us to expand in every direction. Beauty and truth are not simple, fixed, they are fathomless and encompass inexplicable paths that are infinite. Nature does not guarantee our spiritual growth ! we have the choice to move or not move. It has never been a question of form, it has always been intent. Forms come and go and change, Looking at a Van Gogh painting and a flower are  the same. We are enshrouded in the beauty of the perfect and imperfect, we cannot grasp and keep it, it is otherworldly, not of our making.  If any Art leaves you like that then honor it.  Ninad

Clothed Nude  | oil on canvas |

These are random brain cell patterns of minute charge data during transmissions of wave coding through excited stimuli of an emotive impulse. They are captured and given expression by a unique process of intuitive photo cell displacement through the imaginative channels of the artist. It becomes apparent that fundamental brain wave activity is by inclination in a state of constant sustained ecstatic movement unless otherwise disturbed by interior or exterior stimulation. Ninad

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CONTEMPLATIVE BRAIN WAVE STATE –  If you sit silently and meditate on this painting, absorbing it’s energy without thought  you will fall into a lovely contemplative state.

EUPHORIC BRAIN WAVE STATE – If you sit silently and meditate on this painting, absorbing it’s energy without thought you will fall into an expansive euphoric state.

From,  TIEBR : The Institute of Energy Body Research,  Los Angeles

For me, space represents time but rather eternal time. It cannot be measured so it is not time at all. There all the drama of life unfolds but it cannot eclipse the space that surrounds it. Everything that happens dissolves into it and is born again out of it. Now that space is our freedom, even if it is hidden, we are never separate from it. So for me that space in art is very important. If I lose it in a painting I can only move in circles until it appears again. I call it the spiritual plasma. But then it is the same space we live in every day with accumulation, gathering, perceptions pilled in heaps. Painting is like that, sorting out the clutter until we come to something real that fills our longing for the totality of what we are or what we can be.    ( click on image to enlarge }

Experience | Oil on canvas  60″ x 28″ | “We have to learn through experience what we are, want and can do and until then we are characterless, ignorant of ourselves and have often to be thrown back into our proper ways by hard blows from without. When finally we shall have learned. And this in short, is neither more nor less than the fullest possible knowledge of our own individuality”.  Joseph Campbell on Schopenhauer.

Recently I’m juxtaposing some new paintings together which is proving very exciting. Even with some new unfinished work this process is leading to some unusual spacial conceptions. It’s particularly interesting because it creates an objective approach to space I might not otherwise discover. We are so conditioned to follow accepted concepts and logic that we often fail to discover what is unknown to us. Also the relationship of forms can get dramatically altered creating a fresh new energy. Sometimes out of this process a completely new vision evolves.

Oil on canvas and paper collage mounted on board | 47″ x 36″

Oil on canvas,  48″ x 28″

Yes the subconscious but deeper, Running down into a vast expanding tunnel of time  that disappears and the universe begins, tossed among minuscule and gargantuan planets, specs of dust, winds with eternal memory. We seem to know something about eternity for it lingers in our hope and the timelessness of love. Did it begin a desire, a need, what came before when creation threw us into the fire. We carry what formed our being, not in clay but in freedom from ourselves and freedom from the memory between birth and death.

CODE. Oil on Canvas, 21″ x 29″