"Do not go to the garden of flowers!
O Friend ! go not there;
In your body is the garden of flowers.
Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus,
and there gaze on the Infinite Beauty."
- Kabir, 15 AD.
I spent a lot of time in the beginning of my artistic journey outside, painting from nature. I found it ery challenging to accurately convey what I was looking at yet found the overall experience joyful. I only started to find consistent success when I was able to internalise what I saw.
What I would do is go for a walk in the park and freely allow myself to enjoy the experience without limiting the experience to a particular view I liked. Once I did this, I would sit down and filter through my walk until I found something, an image, in my minds eye that resonated with me. Allowing this image to sit with me I would meditate for 5 minutes and start painting when I felt the overwhelming urge to express it. Naturally the paintings became more abstract but it was the conviction that my mark making carried that made the paintings successful.
This taught me something important about the process of creating an artwork. From this I started to naturally go less and less outside and rely more on my own experiences in meditation, as a source of inspiration and guidance. This continues to come with its own challenges as it's much easier to work from a visual reference. When I find it difficult to progress in this manner I fall back on this poem which greatly encouraged this new internal direction of my work.
Ultimately I wish to go beyond the material world, to go deeper, and express universal truths. There is so much happening in the world, so much war, division, sorrow. How can I justify my position as an artist knowing the dire situation many people find themselves in. I want my Art to be a voice of hope in these difficult times, full of confusion. I wish to direct people back to themselves, their spirit, from which one can know themselves on a deeper level and become that light from within.
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