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Highlights
August, 2002 |
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This is the third painting on this particular canvas. I have been working on this canvas for almost twenty years now. The first painting was dealing with the ancient Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. The second one came out of Aztec art and this third one is based on one incident in the Ramayana story.
The subject matter comes with a specific name, not an ideology. The titles which I give to the paintings come out of mythological incidents from the cultures of Greece, Rome, Aztec , Hindu and Buddhist but not from Islamic culture. These mythological forms supersede in multiplicity all the modernistic forms which one can see in 19th and 20th century works of art. These civilizations which have been absorbed by me are ones that have a varied expressionistic, nonrealistic, mythological format where the human form comes into a great variety of masks and gestures and postures with a combination of animal power and the power of the spirit attributed to the human form. This wide range of subject matter can be manifested on any ongoing work which is almost seventy percent completed in an abstract form.
Each progressive version of this painting came off better than the previous one.
This last one is super. It is the best. So I am not going to do anymore work on this painting. Three years later I might improve upon it if I improve my personal aesthetic life. This painting is very subtle and by structure very powerful, very innovative, even now. Each version has a definite progress according to my aesthetic sensibilities. My conceptual layout of this particular painting was extremely spontaneous and it has assimilated the best part of the previous painting. My modernistic view point is to go historically back and forth in terms of art, literature, nationality or anything else. It is the congruence of a dreamlike spirit which travels or hovers from 35,000 years ago of the Altamira caves to paintings created today. Thousands of gods and goddesses which travel on winged horses which bear the burden of innumerable Hindu deities are depicted by four small horses crafted separately and attached to the canvas.
It was not that the ten headed and twenty armed Shrimat Ravana, the King of Shreelanka wanted Sita, the wife of Lord Rama who was the direct incarnation of Lord Vishnu. It was not the so called great beneficent kingdom of Rama that he wanted to conquer. Shrimat Ravana had many beautiful, highly educated wives . He was a great musician, a renown scholar, a scientist and a philosopher and his ten heads represented this wide range of intellectual pursuits.His twenty arms represented all the crafts that a human could achieve at his best. Above all he was a revered devotee of Lord Shiva and enjoyed his greatest blessing. He ran his kingdom, Shreelanka, with the greatest magnificence and tolerance.
However, he was wanting his life to be ended in moksha.
To gain this freedom from a possible insignificant rebirth he visited Kailasa, the residence of Lord Shiva in the Himalayas. On this visit Lord Siva told him that his death at the hands of Lord Rama would bring him the moksha. Shrimat Ravana probably had a lot of other philosophical involvement in his mind when Sita was abducted by him and taken to Shreelanka. She was very carefully guarded and he never even bothered to dishonor her. He was actually waiting for Lord Rama's invasion. In the beginning it came in the form of Shri Marutti, a monkey king, a devotee of Shri Rama. Shri Marutti took a spiritual leap from Ayodhya straight into the midst of Shreelanka. He met Sita and to prove his devotion to her and Shree Rama he tore open his heart literally and showed her the image of Shree Rama and Sita within his heart. However, Shri Marutti did manage at the end to burn down a large part of Shreelanka.
To end the mythological story abruptly Shrimat Ravana ultimately lost his life and managed to acquire his moksha. The abduction of Sita was not very important. However, it is still surprising that she had to go through fire to prove her purity.
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