week ending Sunday 21st
On Fridays there is a local social event for Ukrainian refugees. This week they invited a well known Ukrainian Artist to run an Art-Workshop. I run a workshop each month to reduce stress and build resilience using Mindfulness, Silk-Painting, Forest-Bathing, Live Cello Music and a Vegetarian Feast. When the war started in Ukraine, I made the workshops free and most participants are now Ukrainian Refugees so I feel very close to this community and like to join in when there is a special event like this.
The artist teaching us was Tatiana and she is well-known for her beautiful paintings of Icons. This is not one of hers, it's actually from the Ukrainian Museum of Cleveland, Ohio - but it gives you a glimpse of how beautiful this traditional style of art is.
Tatiana showed us how to hold the brush and vary the thickness of the line, by changing the pressure. If you start by just touching the paper with the tip of the brush and then increase the pressure as you bring the line down, you can create beautiful petal-shapes. She had created a range of paper cups, some black and some white, covered with flowers to inspire us. We started by painting on a sheet of paper, using some templates of traditional flower designs for inspiration. I chose one and used it in a vaguely symmetrical way. My technique was not good at all - but I wanted to create something that would hold some meaning to give to Tatiana, in appreciation of her work and the inspiration she was giving to everyone in the workshop.
The flowers are blue and yellow - the colours of the Ukrainian flag, but the blue doesn't show up well here. It was a much brighter blue. The Peace Dove is 'Picasoeque' that's my excuse for the fact that it looks nothing like a Peace Dove. The overal composition is, in my view, too crowded and not sufficiently symmetrical - but you can see progress in my 'petal-shapes' in the second flower on the right when it comes to the 'blue leaves.' and it's significant for me because it's the first time I have tried to write in Cyrillic Script.
Here are some photos from the workshop which Tatiana sent me afterwards.
I'm in a rush now, with my January workshop coming up fast, so I will keep this week's blog quite brief and just finish now with some quotations and poems about art and creativity.
Question: How can I make my everyday actions an art?
Sri Chinmoy: You have to feel that each hour in your life is a page of your life-book, and that you are studying, memorising and utilising the wisdom of that page in your life. Every hour you have to feel that you have studied one particular page of your life-book. When the wisdom of that page enters into you, immediately there appears in you a form of creativity. Creativity does not only mean writing poems or stories. No! Creativity can be inside one’s heart: creativity can take place inside one’s body-consciousness. Creativity means a kind of manifestation inside you. When you study that particular page, the wisdom recorded there is spread inside your being. That is called creativity. If you can feel that every hour is a page in your life-book and that you are studying it, then every action of yours will be an art.
Sri Chinmoy
Art's Life and the Soul's Light - 1974
Art itself is the Art of arts, although unrecognised.
One truth is clear, very clear. Whatever is, is art. How can any creation of the Supreme Artist be a denial of Him? Even beneath the ugliest and the most loathsome shines His all-loving Face of beauty.
Love is the most charming of all arts. Love is so because it is “life” itself and not the translation of life.
Art is the outer vesture of love. Art, like love, is a force of oneness with the Infinite. When we create a piece of art, we are really re-creating or reflecting some beauty of the Infinite.
Imagination is an essential attribute of the creative power of the mind. It is that son of the mind that sees a thing before it is brought into the material plane.
Imagination, too, has to surrender to its Master: Will. If it is incapable of that, it can never originate anything.
Art is an exacting goddess that demands one’s offering of heart, mind and body.
Nature is the mother of an artist. She serves the artist with a presentation of her beauties, visible and invisible.
Nature is the unmistakable evidence of evolutionary growth, and growth is the evidence of life; life, divinely organised and governed, is the evidence of art at its highest.
Keats’ address to art: “Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time” is but half-truth. Art is the child of Silence, no doubt, but it transcends Time.
Beauty without grace is a flower without fragrance.
As man is, after all, an integral being, art has its claim, like knowledge and religion, to be one of his true occupations in life.
Art is creation solidified and concretised.
Art is the joint fulfilment of Truth and Beauty.
Art is the wonderful convincing bridge between the sweetest harmony and the most perfect rhythm.
Physical beauty in a human being is an external manifestation of some inner harmony and truth. This inner beauty is at its highest in the full opening of the soul towards God.
The supreme Art is to know the Supreme Artist intimately, within and without. This knowledge, well-established, cannot but guide all our movements on artistic lines. And this knowledge will be the basis of a perfectly beautiful life within and without. Art in the most effective sense of the term is a sublime truth that draws our soul from within towards the infinite Vast.
Sri Chinmoy,
Eternity's Breath, 1972
Question: Is there any relationship between beauty and art?
Sri Chinmoy: Beauty and art go together. It is like a beautiful flower. A flower is nature's art, God's art. But when you look at it with your eyes and appreciate it, then what you see along with the flower is its beauty. The flower itself is art, but what it embodies is beauty. How can you separate beauty from the thing that embodies beauty? So, in that way, art and beauty go together.
Sri Chinmoy
Jharna-Kala: The Art of Sri Chinmoy.
We do not have to go
To a particular exhibit
To see the supreme art.
Our aspiration-life itself
Is the supreme art.
Sri Chinmoy
Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspriation-Plants, No 23802, Part 239 1997