Shahree Vyaas's Blog, page 28

Many are Called, Few are Chosen.

This painting (acrylic on canvas 24′ x36′) illustrates how the art-world functions. Many are called, only few are chosen.

A variety of pages where artists post are filled with delusional pep-talk. The latest example was a debuting writer who got ecstatic about her first rejection letter from a publisher. She saw it as a proof that the publishers started to notice her and many of the people congratulated her with that amazing feat. When I pointed out that it was most likely an automatically generated message (after 200 + rejections I know how they look like), I got the whole page over me for being “negative”.

Another one proudly posted: “I just got my first ever paycheck from Medium. ⁣⁣It’s for 8 cents. ⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣And I’m genuinely PUMPED … Proof that you should keep going. Proof that you should believe in yourself. ⁣⁣⁣Proof that your best is yet to come. ”

I wrote: “You wouldn´t be an artist when you aren´t a dreamer”. She answered: “I wouldn´t be an artists if I wasn´t a doer”.

Great, keep making art, but it´s a thorny path for those dreaming of fame and fortunes. Many are called, but only few are chosen. It all depends how successful you are in branding yourself. Those can sell an aquarium filled with formaldehyde, put a dead shark into it, call it “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” and sell it for one million to an art dealer who on his turn sells it for 12 million USD to a banker. This is a true story: the artist´s name is Damien Hirst, the art dealer was Saatchi, and the banker´s name Steven A. Cohen.

The average artists get excited when they receive 8 cents from Medium or a rejection letter of a publisher. Or that their work is selected for an exposition as long they´re willing to pay a hefty contribution.

I gave up my dreams for fame and fortune and start to see my artistic activity more as a path towards personal growth. I consider that time is my most precious commodity and don´t want to waste any of it anymore in probably vain efforts to promote my art. I create and put it in the window where it has to stand on its own. On an occasion I will boost a post about my art on FB for 10 USD, but leave it to that. And it´s on Saatchi and Amazon: mostly ignored.

It sells, it doesn’t sell: I do no longer care. Time spent on self-promotion is time taken from personal growth. Money and fame can come and go, time not. Which doesn´t mean that I don´t crave some recognition of my works, but this feeling is subordinate to my creative drive to grow as a person. “Art is Business” is a slogan that doesn´t resonate with me anymore. It sounds a little like: Politics is Business, Religion is Business, Justice is Business, Love is Business, Healthcare is Business, Education is Business, etc… and the ultimate ones: War and Genocide are Business.

The Hatching of Chaos

The Hatching (acrylic on canvas 36′ x 24′) relates to the Alchemy of Chaos. It is an image that reflects the experience of the birth of new insights. It is a painting that will challenge you, move you, and ignite you.
It is what you are searching for and what you’re running from, all in one. It is an unconventional conversation, alive with the tension of possibility. It relates to an ancient pursuit that is part scientific, part spiritual, and part magical, that is applied to transform something of little value into something of great value.
Chaos was originally identified as a vast, nonlinear space in which all possibility lies…the origin of everything. It denotes the necessity of everything being put into disorder to allow what’s next to arise. Alchemy of Chaos is a pursuit to grasp more fully what is required to face reality, embrace radical change, and understand that what is here for you now is a set of ingredients that, if acknowledged and utilized, will allow you to create the metaphorical gold.
Tapping into the Alchemy of Chaos familiarizes you with a tool belt fit for leading through uncertain, volatile, and ambiguous seasons. This painting is designed to help see unseen paths, to imagine unimagined possibilities, to know unknown truths, to feel unfelt understandings. It invites a more grounded and self-aware way to be and to lead, beginning with coming to know who you are choosing to be now. This space is about experimenting with the possibility of eliminating traditional strategic techniques to cultivate immense courage and immense vision.
The invitation for you is to become an alchemist. Step into the possibility that awaits you beyond strategy, beyond the mental monkey mind, beyond forecasts, and beyond what is “known”.
Understand that alchemy is what happens during the process and is not found into the outcome. Everything is constantly into a state of flux of transformation taking place

Pistols n Poppies

Pistols n Poppies, Acrylic on canvas 46 x 25 cm by Shaharee Vyaas (Jan 1, 2022)

We often think of Freud as having suggested that everything can be interpreted in the context of sexuality, so the imagery of shooting bullets through a cylindrical barrel is hard to ignore. This is especially true when we acknowledge that the most gun violence and nearly every case of mass shooting is perpetrated by men. Thinking along those lines seems to be consistent with the observation that gun violence among men — especially in the context of mass shootings where perpetrators are haven mostly been white — is sometimes about compensating for feelings of impotence with fantasies of revenge that often end in suicide, or the perpetrator being killed by law enforcement. Going out with a bang, if you will. Red poppy flowers represent consolation, remembrance, and death. Likewise, the poppy is a common symbol that has been used to represent everything from peace to death and even simply sleep. Since ancient times, poppies placed on tombstones represent eternal sleep

Tidal Disruption

This painting (acrylic on canvas 46 x 23 cm) aimed to unite the boundless freedom of human imagination with the mathematical precision of the physical world by using the alchemic approach.

There exist are several historic detectable strands of alchemy that seemed independent in their earlier stages, including Chinese, Indian, and Western alchemy. The aim of alchemy was to purify, mature and perfect objects, through the process of chrysopoeia, the transmutation of base metals, search for and creation of the panaceas, including an elixir of immortality, and the perfection of human soul and body

In the late 19th and 20th century the fascination with alchemy among artists continued, but the motifs and use of alchemical knowledge in their works differ from the previous ages. Modernist artists have seen themselves as esoteric thinkers distinguished from others by the unique creative powers they possessed. The appearance of abstract forms in the last decades of the 19th century can be linked to practices such as Anthroposophy, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Buddhism. Rudolf Steiner and Theosophical Society influenced avant-garde artists from Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia.

They reject the traditional concept of a work of art, and instead link it to the will of an artist who can elevate any object to art. Just like the catholic priests who claim they have the power to turn an ordinary small round waffle into the body of Christ through the so called transubstantiation process during the the consecration, the climax of every catholic mass.

In this perspective, every catholic priest is a greater artist than all conceptual artists who go around, declaring that everything is art what they consecrate to be art. The catholic priest at least offers a metaphysical concept that allows his flock to think-the-the-world-together. When everything can be art, nothing is art. Conceptualism is causing a massive artistical inflation. Just as the massive influx of robbed gold coming from the colonies into 16th century Spain rendered the metal almost worthless.

While I acknowledge that absurdism has its place in the artistical specter, I consider its value more as an anecdotical source of beauty and interest. Those works mostly relate to ancient archetypes that are explored by Jungian psychology and often feature prominently in ancient mythological worldviews.

I advocate a more balanced approach of the alchemist method in art. Artists have the freedom to explore visions that lay outside the teleology of the scientifically approach, they should nevertheless not keep themselves busy by getting lost in mystical nonsense that instead of offering a fresh perspective upon the reality, unnecessarily cloud and complicate the subject at hand.

Alchemy as a proto-science can be an excellent guideline to explore the borderline where fantasy and knowledge are intersecting. My vision resonates with a quote by Francisco Goya: “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.”

The Front Yard of Eden

After some cumbersome trekking I arrived at the center of my artistic universe. On top of this post you find an artistic impression that I´ve titled The Front Yard of Eden (acrylic on canvas 46 x 25 cm).

To reach the front yard of Eden, the curious explorers will need to leave the beaten tourist trail and be willing to do a 200 km overland hike from the nearest by international airport, followed by a 40 minutes boat trip.

As the name and the image indicate, it’s a beautiful place, but also one that eats the careless ones. Cocaine and alcohol are cheap and abundant: the temptation is insane. I know many expats who’ve met an early grave because of substance abuse.

And then you have the do-gooders who arrive here with a soap box under their arms to preach Jesus, democracy, ecology, and fairness from the walls of their ivory towers. They´re tolerated as long they´re distributing money and other goodies, but ran-off by the locals as soon as they started to interfere with local politics, customs, or believes.

Another category consists of the sufferers of a midlife crisis, the retired blue collars, the disillusioned war veterans, etc…. They come here and pick up a young girl in the firm believe that she´s attracted to their manly maturity, to find out that in the end they were only perceived as a walking wallet, and end up as bar flies.

No paradise without snake, but for the ones who manage to avoid the obvious traps, this place can be a very rewarding experience. Its beauty is inspiring, the people friendly (as long you respect the previously mentioned boundaries), and the weather is yearlong agreeable when you disregard the rainy season with its occasional hurricane (the last big one was like 25 years ago: the people who’re old enough still talk about it, but 50 % of the population doesn’t qualify, and think it’s old people’s ranting).

Lost

Lost (acrylic on canvas 46 x 23 cm) is a painting that expresses a feeling that’s very common nowadays. It figures some African people who rather risk their lives by crossing a sea in an overloaded shaky dingy than to suffer a miserable existence in their homelands, the Arab man who finds no better purpose in life then to become a suicidal terrorist , and the Western woman who´s looking for guidance on a failing map. All this happens under the light of a looming Omega-virus.

The inspiration of this painting came to me after a hike along a jungle trail to see the biggest waterfall of Central America at Pico Bonito in Honduras. The trail was meandering alongside of some steep cliffs and at some points was barely one foot wide, with a deep ravine on one side and a a steep solid rock wall on the other. There was only a rudimentary sketch of the trail available that had to serve as a guidance, and of course no cell phone signal available to make google maps work. So you had to figure out your trajectory more or less on the whim, while you had to dedicate 90 % of your attention to the next step you wanted to take if you didn´t want to end up as a meatball at the feet of the cliffs or with a snake bite.

I came to appreciate how this hike had many similarities with the way lots of people have to maneuver through life: step by step, with a sketchy map, driven by some vague purpose. In the jungle you need a constant eye for not stepping upon a snake or a loose stone which would give your nearby future prospects a very bleak outlook. Similarities can be found into the lives of people who live at the edge of society: a misguided word, act, or gesture can carry deep running consequences.

I feel pretty sure that the suicidal terrorist hasn’t been born with an innate destructive drive and that the Africans who migrate north would also prefer to stick around their relatives and houses. And all that plays against the canvas of a worldwide pandemic with a virus that rapidly mutates towards an omega variant.

Also many Western people are at loss into in an increasingly complicated world where you need half day to dig through a pile of red tape before you can board an airplane, make a tax declaration, or do whatsoever. Most Western people have to scramble to earn a decent living and then have to scramble to keep it that way. Not many can afford the luxury of setting out a course through life of their own liking or to take a pause to see where the path they’re walking is bringing them or to choose one of their own liking. Many are drifting through life without a decent map or compass, with only a vague impression of where they’re heading.

The Joyful Entry of Omicron

The Joyful Entry of Omicron (acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cm) is a painting about an announced disaster. Everyone with some grain of common sense knew that with the start of the traditional flu season The Bug would strike again. And yeah, there you have its latest spawn that has been baptized Omicron.

What actually nerves me is the amount of people in Western countries who had plenty of opportunities to get a vaccine, who are now filling up the IC beds. Like the sixty years old vaccine refuser Valentin who lies since October on the oxygen in an IC unit. It goes better with him since they took him from the respirator, but he will need a double lung transplantation because the virus destroyed his lung tissue.

Meanwhile, my brother can´t get his cancer operation because Valentin lies in his bed. The operation has been postponed till January. If the cancer hasn´t spread by then, and if Valentin doesn´t jump ahead of him to get his transplants. Don´t even get me started about who will pay for Valentin´s choice of not getting vaccinated.

And yes, also vaccinated people land on the IC unit. Mostly the old and the sick who have a weaker immunity system that makes the vaccine less effective. 80 % protection is not 100 %, so vaccinated people still can get Covid, but as far as the statistics go, there is almost no incidence of healthy vaccinated adults landing on IC or dying because of Covid.

It´s also not very astonishing that most variants come to us from countries where the vaccination rate is very low. As long the virus can circulate, it will keep mutating, and produce other variants. Non-vaccinated people are Covid-variant producers and it´s probably just a question of time before the highly contagious but not very lethal Covid virus (mortality about 2.5 %) will fuse with a lethal flue variant. Like the bird´s flue H5N1, who has a mortality rate of a staggering 60 %, but is luckily not very contagious. Unless it would team up with a Covid variant. Cross my fingers it won´t happen, but this is a strong case where Murphy´s Law may come down hard.

So Omicron is here to stay for the remainder of the flue season. Let´s hope it´s not any nastier than its Delta cousin and that our vaccines will hold out against it. And make the vaccine compulsory and damn the refuseniks with their laments about their constitutional rights. My brother too has constitutional rights. While the statistics are very precise about the amount of people that died on Covid, there is an equally big number of people who died unnoticed because they didn´t get the care they needed. Collateral damage I suppose?

Evolution: Entrance or Exit?

The image above features an octopod hovering in front of the gates of evolution, watched over by a malevolent shoggoth.

A scientific paper claims that octopods are actually aliens brought to Earth by frozen meteors. Why the octopus in particular? “Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch color and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene.” This terrestrial evolution occurred thanks to “cryopreserved squid and/or octopus eggs” crashing into the ocean on comets “several hundred million years ago.”

Above the gate floats a shoggoth. Everyone who´s familiar with the Lovecraft universe, knows that the shoggoths were a creation of the elder ones to serve them as slaves. In such a society the Elder Ones were free to pursue their interests in art, science and architecture. However, the obvious dark side to such a society is where one is free to purse one’s interests, there has to be a group of entities present to perform the necessary tasks and labor to keep society going; this work was conducted by the Shoggoths.

While the enslavement of the Shoggoths allowed the Elder One’s civilization to flourish, it was also their downfall. It appears that when the Shoggoths acquired the ability to reproduce through fission, it came along with a “dangerous degree of accidental intelligence”, which caused problems for the Elder Ones. A shoggoth is capable of shaping itself into whatever organs or shapes it finds necessary at the moment; however, in its usual state it tends to sport a roiling profusion of eyes, mouths, and pseudopodia. It could be considered as the summum of evolutionary progress by our actual standards.

As such it remains unclear if the octopod stage marks the beginning or the end of the planet´s evolutionary tract. Or both.

Crossroads

In folklore, crossroads may represent a location “between the worlds” and, as such, a site where supernatural spirits can be contacted and paranormal events can take place. In Greek mythology, crossroads were associated with both Hermes and Hecate, with shrines and ceremonies for both taking place there. The herm pillar associated with Hermes frequently marked these places due to the god’s association with travelers and role as a guide.

In nearly all countries, and at all times, special significance has been attached to the place where roads cross one another. In Christian times it was the spot chosen for the burial of suicides and condemned criminals. This practice seems to have arisen, not merely because the roads form the sign of the cross and so make the ground the next best burial-place to a properly consecrated churchyard, but because the ancient Teutons erected altars at cross-roads on which they sacrificed criminals. Thus cross-roads were of old regarded as execution-grounds. The chief fact prompting the choice of the special locality must be, I think, that just as a circle commands every direction, so cross-roads, pointing north, south, east and west, command every main direction, and the actual point of crossing is the only point where people coming from every direction must pass.

At the funeral of a Brāhman in India, five balls of wheat-flour and water are offered to various spirits. The third ball is offered to the spirit of the cross-roads of the village through which the corpse will be carried. Lamps are also placed at cross-roads. During the marriage rite among the Bharvāds in Gujarat, an eunuch flings balls of wheat-flour towards the four quarters of the heavens, as a charm to scare evil spirits; and in the same province, at the Holī festival, the fire is lighted at a quadrivium. In Mumbai seven pebbles, picked up from a place where three roads meet, are used as a charm against the evil eye. Some of the Gujarāt tribes, apparently with the intention of dispersing the evil or passing it on to some traveler, sweep their houses on the first day of the month Kārttik (November), and lay the refuse in a pot at the cross-roads.

In Africa cross-roads are largely used to effect cures. When a man is ill the native doctor takes him to a cross-road, where he prepares a medicine, part of which is given to the patient and part buried under an inverted pot at the juncture of the roads. It is hoped that someone will step over the pot, catch the disease, and so relieve the original sufferer. The use of cross-roads as a place for disease-transference is widespread: there exist examples of the custom from Japan, Bali (Indian Archipelago), Guatemala, Cochin-China, Bohemia and England.

Crossroads is a paintng that symbolizes a metaphysical approach of the concept, using the five alchemistic elements to illustrate how our reality is a tissue made of constant interactions and choices. The element fire has been given a central place since it is the catalysator between the other four elements (water, earth, air , and ether). I´m rarely using figurative abstractionism in my works, so this painting deviates a little from my usual output.

Demons

Most authors who wrote theological dissertations on the subject either truly believed in the existence of infernal spirits or wrote as a philosophical guide to understanding an ancient perspective of behavior and morality in folklore and religious themes.

I leave it in the middle if demons exist as independent beings who walk our reality but feel rather sure that most people are familiar with the existence of some demons that they struggle with. They mostly consist of some irresistible auto-destructive drive like substance abuse, promiscuity, gambling, and many other vices that ultimately can lead to the physical and moral bankruptcy of a life.

In my opinion the true demons that walk this planet and that are not exclusively rooting into our own mental processes, are the demagogues that incite people to commit morally questionable acts while letting them believe they´re doing the right thing. You find them prominently among cult leaders, politicians, and managers of multinational corporations. Their power to disturb the moral compass of a mass of followers can sometimes astonish a thoughtful observer.

A second category consists of the people with a damaged mind. Here I´m referring to the psychopaths, sociopaths, and schizophrenic. These people have a broken moral compass and are driving other people into ruin to satisfy some alien mental disposition.

Finally, we sometimes perceive demons where there are none. Like some youngsters demonizing the older generations for all the social and cultural imperfections they perceive, or the left and right wing politicians mutually blaming each other for a lack of common sense (while the truth usually lays in the middle, but polarization is easier to sell to a voting public), or the eternal disputes between men and women about whom has the right perspective upon the reality (while both views have their merits and shortcomings).