Flex Mentallo

The Ajanta Caves in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, India are about 30 rock-cut Buddhist cave monuments which date from the 2nd century BCE to about 480 or 650 CE.

The Royal College of Art is in the same building as the Victoria and Albert Museum (which has the sculptures of Meera Mukherjee in its collection), and on declaring my interest in travelling to India, was advised that the V&A had a collection of life sized transcriptions of the murals of Ajanta which on request the Curator would allow me to view, and I did so. But nothing could prepare me for the reality, which if anything has grown, rather than diminished in the memory.

My visit there was the most unearthly experience of my life, and nothing before or since has more profoundly affected my attitudes to life and art.

During my first two years in India I travelled extensively, and took numerous photographs, only to discover that the Orwo brand of film negative I had been buying and using there was virtually all useless. Only one roll was printable, of which only a single print, the one below, from my visit to Ajanta, survives.

What stood before me was nothing less than a depiction of the mundane world transmogrified into the earthly paradise, now free from want, now free from war, Buddhist, spiritual, enlightened, earthy, vegetarian, pacifist, but above all, vibrantly alive.

I fancied I could see what the still photograph cannot possibly convey; a message in a voice sculpted in light, transported through time, for as long as the stupa endures, that spoke to me and said, “Remember us. We lived life joyously. We shared life openly and gladly with all living things. Now we have been transported beyond duality as will you be.”

I visited Sanchi at dawn one day in 1981, and as the sun rose, light and shadow animated the densely populated scenes. The Emperor Ashoka enters his city on the back of a great elephant escorted by a troupe of drummers. Above them, lying on a roof top, they are observed by a young woman. A radiant smile plays across her features. By her side is a tame peacock. In the fruit laden trees behind her, monkeys are at play. Everywhere is life, and light, and motion. And I understood what Coomaraswamy meant – the great Indian sculptors worked not with stone, but with light, with evanescence – and through light they strove to capture the transience of life, it’s beauty and its joy.

Remorseful, he built many Buddhist shrines, and he sent his only daughter Sanghamitra and son Mahindra to spread Buddhism in Tamraparni , which Horace Walpole later knew as the isles of Serendip, and which we know today as Sri Lanka. Buddhism still flourishes there.

Legend has it that after a great conquest that caused the death of thousands, Ashoka converted to Buddhism. What have I done? If this is a victory, what's a defeat then? Is this a victory or a defeat? Is this justice or injustice? Is it gallantry or a rout? Is it valor to kill innocent children and women? Did I do it to widen the empire and for prosperity or to destroy the other's kingdom and splendor? One has lost her husband, someone else a father, someone a child, someone an unborn infant.... What's this debris of the corpses? Are these marks of victory or defeat? Are these vultures, crows, eagles the messengers of death or evil?

It has four profusely carved ornamental gateways and a balustrade encircling the whole structure. They each represent love, peace, trust, and courage

Its nucleus was a simple hemispherical brick structure built over the relics of the Buddha. It was crowned by the chatra, a parasol-like structure symbolising high rank, which was intended to honour and shelter the relics.

The 'Great Stupa' at Sanchi is the oldest stone structure in India and was originally commissioned by the emperor Ashoka the Great in the 3rd century BCE.

I had opportunity to understand this first hand when I visited the Buddhist stupa at Sanchi.

By contrast, the great Singhalese writer Ananda Coomaraswamy, (who was also a friend and associate of Rabindranath Tagore, whose poetry I posted yesterday), sought to enlighten the West regarding Indian art, seeking to relate it’s values to those of Plato, Heraclitus and other Greek philosophers. Human cultures in all their apparent diversity are but the dialects of one and the same language of the spirit, that there is a "common universe of discourse" transcending the differences of tongues. He pointed out that Indian sculptors did not work with stone – they worked with light.

I had not thought about these paintings, Seurat or Roger Fry for many years. But of all these things, it is the name of Roger Fry that surprisingly conjures up the most compelling associations, which carry me back to India, and through the medium of classical Indian art transports me into my own past and the deep influence Indian art has had on me. And beyond that, to Black Marigolds. Here is Fry talking about Indian art just before his death. The general aspect of almost all Indian works of art is intensely and acutely distasteful to me. It is excessive and redundant, it shows an extravagant and exuberant fancy which seems uncontrolled by any principle of co-ordination and, above all perhaps, the quality of its rhythms displeases me by its nerveless and unctuous sinuosity. In striking contrast to Chinese art, the sensuality of Indian artists is exceedingly erotic--the leitmotiv of much of their sculpture is taken from the more relaxed and abandoned poses of the female figure. A great deal of their art, even their religious art, is definitely pornographic, and although I have no moral prejudices against that form of expression it generally interferes with aesthetic considerations by interposing a strong irrelevant interest which tends to distract both the artist and the spectator from the essential purposes of a work of art.... the Indians are almost totally lacking in that organizing and co-ordinating power without which no cogent and inevitable unity can be achieved He later goes on to compare Indian classical sculpture to that of Ancient Greece, and finds it severely wanting. To him Indian sculpture reveals a fundamental ignorance of anatomy, and hence a failure to embody universal ideals about perfection. In so doing he inadvertently revealed within himself a chasm of incomprehension about what Indian art is intended to convey. And in the absolute presumption of the rightness of his view, visited upon himself the very ignorance he claimed for them.

The Labyrinth is a slightly later painting in this style and was painted during my two years as a post-graduate student in India at the University of Baroda in Gujarat. It is in the collection of the Arts Council of Great Britain. http://www.artscouncilcollection.org.uk/loadWork.do?id=6643

It is one of only two of my works to find it's way into National collections, both of them quite by chance influenced by Seurat's technique. The Trojan Horse is in the Government Collection http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/artists_list.aspx?&l=A&lt=thumbnails&sb=ArtistName&sl=AM%20-%20AZ&pg=2

I took a liking to Seurat's pointillist approach and began using it. The Trojan Horse is based on an early, glowing photograph of my parents before they were married and is a premonition of my mother's early death.

When as a student I attended the Royal College of Art in London I found I had access to the great national collections, including the National Gallery, which is the home for another great Seurat painting, Bathers at Asnières.

Seeing the Seurat also reminded me that the term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism. In November 1910, Fry organised the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists (a term which he coined) at the Grafton Galleries, London. This exhibition was the first to prominently feature Gauguin, Manet, Matisse, and Van Gogh in England and brought their art to the public. Fry’s essay on Seurat is regarded as one of the cornerstones of modern art criticism. No-one who has a real understanding of the art of painting attaches any importance to what we call the subject of a picture – what is represented. To one who feels the language of pictorial form, all depends on how it is presented, nothing on what. (Roger Fry)

...and others inside those It is rightly regarded as one of the seminal works of the late 19th Century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Seurat

There are pictures within the picture...

Although at first sight a "still life" it is full of animated vignettes

From Wikipedia: Georges Seurat spent over two years painting A Sunday Afternoon, focusing meticulously on the landscape of the park. He reworked the original as well as completed numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches. He would go and sit in the park and make numerous sketches of the various figures in order to perfect their form. He concentrated on the issues of colour, light, and form. The painting is approximately 2 by 3 meters (6 ft 10 in x 10 ft 1 in) in size. Motivated by study in optical and colour theory, Seurat contrasted miniature dots of colors that, through optical unification, form a single hue in the viewer's eye. He believed that this form of painting, called divisionism at the time but now known as pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brush strokes. The use of dots of almost uniform size came in the second year of his work on the painting, 1885-86. To make the experience of the painting even more vivid, he surrounded it with a frame of painted dots, which in turn he enclosed with a pure white, wooden frame, which is how the painting is exhibited today at the Art Institute of Chicago. In creating the picture, Seurat employed the then-new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), most visibly for yellow highlights on the lawn in the painting, but also in mixtures with orange and blue pigments. In the century and more since the painting's completion, the zinc yellow has darkened to brown — a colour degeneration that was already showing in the painting in Seurat's lifetime.[2] The island of la Grande Jatte is located at the very gates of Paris, lying in the Seine between Neuilly and Levallois-Perret, in a short distance from where nowadays stands La Defense business district. Although for many years it was an industrial site, it is today the site of a public garden and a housing development. When Seurat began the painting in 1884, the island was a bucolic retreat far from the urban center. The painting was first exhibited in 1886, dominating the second Salon of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, of which Seurat had been a founder in 1884. The painting was the basis for the 1984 Broadway musical Sunday In The Park With George by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_In_The_Park_With_George And even an episode of Desperate Housewives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_in_the_Park_with_George_%28Desperate_Housewives%29

Black Marigolds If it is about anything at all, this strand is about the power of memory, and perhaps perception.. In some respects memory is all we are. Seeing Cat's post of Seurat's great pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte had a similar effect on me as the taste of madeleines on Proust. In In Search of Lost Time (also known as Remembrance of Things Past), author Marcel Proust uses madeleines to contrast involuntary memory with voluntary memory. The latter designates memories retrieved by "intelligence," that is, memories produced by putting conscious effort into remembering events, people, and places. Proust's narrator laments that such memories are inevitably partial, and do not bear the "essence" of the past. The most famous instance of involuntary memory by Proust is known as the "episode of the madeleine," yet there are at least half a dozen other examples in In Search of Lost Time. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea. —Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time What this has to do with "Black Marigolds" will I hope become plain by the end of this brief narration, which I hope will entertain, if nothing else.