Skip to main content

From religion to spirit

It is a book I have lived with for years, and have given to several people, but thought I ought to read it rather than only dwell on its images, though what images!

Theodore Wolff's 'Morris Graves: Flower Paintings' is a fabulously beautiful book and seeks to account for a journey in painting from here...


to here:


From the Wounded Gull of 1943 to the Winter Bouquet (flowering quince, rosehaws, narcissus, winter rose and camelia) of 1977.

It is a journey from disturbance to serenity, from a painting of symbolism to one of particular presence and from a painting infused with religion to one of opened spirit.

Wolff dwells on the painterly characteristics of this transformation and does so sympathetically but it is apparent that a dimension is missing, namely the metaphysics of the unfolding art. That Graves was not consciously programmatically engaged with this is true, that he was personally engaged with it is equally true. Graves was educated in the metaphysic of both Vedanta and Zen, was practiced in meditation and his art is a practiced contemplation.

Wolff quotes Graves telling his biographer, Ray Kass, "I painted 'religious pictures' until I tired of the 'blat' of it!" ... (and in his flower paintings) ... "I have stopped trying to say anything - there is no statement or message other than the presence of the flower and the light - that is enough."

This compressed paragraph immediately put me in mind of the Flower sermon of the Buddha that gave rise to zen. Ascending the teaching dais one day, the Buddha is given a flower, rather than preach, the Buddha simply held it out, proffering it to his disciples, and one, Mahakasyapa, smiled!

Tiring of the preaching of the way of liberation, and the 'blat' of it, the Buddha offered the direct transmission of seeing a flower as itself, a liberated presence, and one of his disciples, saw.

The Wounded Gull is a powerful painting, full of the symbolism of a world broken, maimed, resonant of its time (1943) and with the internal fracture of the painter but it preaches. It is not a wounded gull, in the simplicity of the accident and pain of its breaking: the gull stands aside for something else to be seen (however compassionate the actual portrayal).

Winter Bouquet is a gentle painting that stands for itself. Each flower is named in its particular vivid and transient presence. The flowers are compassionately seen, and loved, as flowers. They stand for nothing, simply are.

Both are a making of high accomplishment from an artist whose life was a journey into seeing in which a splintered world is made whole and in which the surfaces are revealed as co-determinous with the depths: where the bridging of symbol, the binding of religion, gives way to images in the translucence of spirit. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more