Hindu monastic and founder of The Traditional Yoga Association, Swami Ambikananda shares her creative journey, accompanied with her insights on art as a form of meditation. Beginning with drawing portraits at school, through to learning oil painting in her 70's.

Uncovering

“It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes ‘art’ in time.”

-Alfred Stieglitz 

Art was not a primary topic in the house I grew up in, so I was in my early teens before I discovered the work of Mary Cassatt, the late 18th - early 19th century artist.  A woman who could paint! 

Until that moment, to my teenage mind, art was for eccentric middle-class men born in or near the Left Bank ~ or with aspirations to live there.  It was a discovery that got me visiting our local art gallery in Johannesburg at least once a week to study pieces of art.  I remember still a Gaudi, with its thickly applied paint and astonishing colours ~ almost creating a 3D effect on a flat canvas.

I had played with my pencils and found I could ~ well, sort of ~ reproduce on paper what I was looking at.  I remember well that I enjoyed drawing trees and my pet chameleon more than anything else.  Delightfully, it was a skill that allowed me to earn 50 cents a portrait from my school friends.

Then I grew up and entered the corporate world and before I knew it, I was bringing up children.  My art books were shelved and didn’t emerge again till my children’s teen years when I tentatively started to put pencil to paper again.

I only started using my completely untrained skills again when, much later, I started teaching Yoga and needed to illustrate certain postures and teachings ~ but always with pencil and paper.

Then Laura came into my life and started her art school.  Oils!  She was teaching an oil portraiture class and here I was, in my seventies, thinking of doing it.  Of course I had tried oils before ~ disastrously!  Brushes just didn’t do what pencils did and the paint… oh! heavens… that paint that took forever to dry! I had already decided by the time I reached my mid-sixties that I didn’t have time before I died to wait for its drying process.

But there I was, on the course, and the first lesson was great: how to block off the image on paper so as to reproduce it yourself on another surface. It was a revelation.  I knew immediately this was going to save me many frustrating hours of rubbing out and re-doing.  Then we moved on to applying the actual oils.  So, there I was, sitting on the floor applying this slippery substance to a rough canvas using a brush that seemed to have a mind of its own, trying to recreate an image.  In the midst of the thought, “Oh God, this is impossible!” something magical happened.

My spiritual life ~ the life of the unmeasured, immeasurable self, has been an inner search since I could remember.  I love science and my respect for it has grown as I have.  However, the limited vision of those who would reduce life to an accident in a mechanistic, meaningless universe, in which only the measurable has reality, never sat well with me.  One does not have to reach my old age to realise that not everything in our universe can be controlled and predicted as the reductionist approach asks us to believe.  So that search for the immeasurable had become my primary focus.

As Laura was talking us through the application of the paint her voice calm, but insistent, had my mind and hand trying ~ largely unsuccessfully ~ to work together, when, suddenly, everything went quiet.  A coherence overtook me ~ mind, body and breath all became engaged in the same thing, and a deeply meditative state took over for most of that class.  Her voice and instructions did not disrupt that process ~ it deepened it through the lesson.  Oil painting had become Yoga.

The primary definition of Yoga was given to us by the philosopher and sage Patanjali, and dates back to about 250 BCE:

‘Yoga is the stilling of the movement of thought in consciousness.  Then we know our true reality.  At all other times, we identify with a passing thought.’1

In that ‘stilling of the movement of thought’ one finds oneself in a space, in a state of consciousness, that is both immeasurable and indescribable.  As the flow of thought ceases, one finds oneself going in a single direction as a different and deeper reality begins to reveal itself.

In the days that followed I finished the portrait Laura had set us as a task for the course, and even liked the end result.  I would love to be able to show it here, but I threw it away ~ as I’ve said: I’m old and have to clear things out.

But it opened a new door for me in my relationship with art. It became part of that search for a deeper and truer reality, part of my Yoga practice, rather than simply a means to an end.

I have done a few portraits again since the course ~ of my spiritual teacher, Swami Venkatesananda, of my favourite singer, Tina Turner, of Maggie Aderin Pocock (an astrophysicist whose deliciously humorous approach always delights me).  I didn’t do them in oils ~ I went to oil pastels, but Laura had given me the courage to work in colour!

Gradually, I got up the nerve to try the portrait of a friend, Clair Louisa.  Something ‘in real life’ if you like.  She is a witty, insightful woman and all of that needed to be reflected on paper.  I have completed the oil pastels portrait of her ~ next comes the oils!  Will let you know how that goes.

And yes, I am definitely going to demand the 50p from her when it’s finished!

Swami Ambikananda

Reference

1.     Patajali Yoga Sutras, verses 2, 3 and 4

Swami Ambikananda

You can find information on The Traditional Yoga Association and Swami Ambikananda by clicking: here

Swami Ambikananda is also the founder of homeless & education charity, MUKTI. For more information, or to take part in their fundraising raffle, click: here