"GIFT FROM THE SOURCE"

(20"x20", acrylic paint and chalk dust on canvas)

A SHORT ESSAY ABOUT THE CREATION OF THIS PIECE

This is very much a sort of "Baba-Jungian" work. I started with just a big black circle outlined with the light yellow surrounding circle and then the gold background.

I wanted a "field for the contents of the Unconscious to emerge." I had NO idea what would come. In fact, the sense of responsibility I felt for every subsequent brush stroke, after preparing that black-circle field and its setting, was so daunting, that I couldn't paint anything!

I then painted Baba's Face in the center circle. I had a wonderful photo of Him from 1931 in England sitting on my easel, and it was a great joy rendering it into the painting, as the Center, which I believe He to be...the Projector of the conscious and the unconscious, the inner and "outer" worlds.

Next came the Rose...I kept working on it after the painting was otherwise "finished"...sat for 2 hours yesterday just trying to get the Rose to look like a REAL rose...so a viewer would not think, "Is that a Rose?" but would simply go INTO the painting as a whole.

After initially painting in the Rose, that BABA is holding the extended stem of and offering to the viewer, I wanted the "big black hole" remaining to BURST INTO COLOR! Initially I had a mental picture of hundreds of very fine (narrow) lines of many colors going all across the black. Realizing that I don't have a brush that fine or the ability to paint such straight, thin lines...I thought of buying some colored chalk and sprinkling the dust of many different colors, over the black area! I did that, and then "fixed" it with some liquid stuff I have...and I feel, at least, that it worked!