What is the form or color of Love? Of Light? Of Unity? Of Oneness? Of Source? Of Home?
White: pure, undivided, unfragmented, whole, unified, one. No shapes and no hues, formless and nameless. That leaves the canvas blank and empty. Contrary to longstanding notion then, love, it appears, makes no art.
As my visual art has progressed over the last decade and distilled into its essence in the last three years, I stumbled upon a realization. I saw that I had organically arrived at a palette of primary colors and rudimentary shapes-yellow, red, and blue. And two shapes merging into One. Telling a story of unity through duality. Always, yellow is the quantum field: the field of Love and Light, of all possibility and of nothingness. Red and blue are the two that are not-two, merging back into One as they always already were before my brush touched the canvas with the (vain) human impulse to mark moments in no-time and no-space. If the viewer were to stretch her imagination, she would likely see the three primary colors and the two shapes they trap into form snap out of their limitations and boundaries and merge back into white, returning the canvas to its untouched, virginal state.
Lately, I find myself wishing to paint barely a suggestion-a frame, a scaffold, a portal-just enough to take me and my viewers on the shortest detour to Home. I feel this way about my music and writing too. Increasingly I feel reluctant to sing or to write very much, as if penetrating the air or sheet with sound or word would divide it unnecessarily into fragments. I feel the vibration of Oneness, anahat naad, in the silence. I see the entire truth and possibility of Love already on the blank canvas. I see the limitation of expression. And yet, until I too am captured in form and captivated in art, I am called to create bits of movement, swirls of this or that, exaltedly and gently conscious of how I am this and I am that, I am both and I am neither, I am the one and I am the none. I just am.
Contrary to longstanding notion then, Love, it appears, makes no art.
Love just is.
Art makes colors and shapes that long to reunite into One.
Art makes Love.
Shahana Dattagupta