THE JOURNEY

I began working on my The Journey, 2017-25, painting about eight years ago when I returned to the Yellow House Afghanistan after being in London with Julian Assange while the Archibald Documentary was being made.  It came back rolled up with the second triptych portrait of Julian, Locking Horns and my Orange Lobster painting of Donald Trump.

I have kept coming back to it over the years and have spent the last two months finishing it in the Werri Studio.  It has been an incredibly complex task masking off areas while I apply the ancient wooden stamps. I have to reach under the canvas with one hand and rub my fingers, hard, against the area where the stamp is held down with my other hand. The back of the canvas is covered in multi coloured fingerprints from this process. 

It is a kind a non-symmetrical Mandala. I can see it hanging happily on the wall of Tibetan Monastery in Lhasa, like Ne Chung. Most of all it relates to the Sufi poetry of Rumi, and many wandering Sufi songs of longing, about moths circling a flame. In my painting some of the moths enter the flame either retaining their own identity or dissolving into it. The large green/blue shape represents a soul on its way either to unite with “IT” or to absorb the incomprehensibility of ultimate spiritual truth.  

When I was doing the portrait of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he told me that he loved the beauty of existence so much he wanted to be reborn while ever there was sentience in the Universe. Then he qualified that by holding his instructive finder in the air and said, “But only if I could retain my self-awareness.”

The mystical dimensions have always been as real as the physical world around me.  From my earliest childhood paintings, I have tried to share what I see on ‘the other side’.

Kandinsky is credited with inventing abstract painting but that is not what he was trying to do. If you read his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art it is clear, he spent his life trying to show others glimpses of the spiritual universe he believed to be on the other side of this.

When people see my paintings like The Journey, 2017-25, and Dancing on the Other Side, 2012, (presently on exhibit in Sanctuary: 25 Years of Hazelhurst Arts Centre) they think I might have given up painting at the frontline of human conflict. That I have stopped showing the harsh realities of war, but I have always painted both. The dark and the light balanced together Like Yin and Yang. My mystical paintings are NOT cathartic therapy for what I have witnessed in the killing fields of Rwanda or Ukraine, they are my lifelong attempt, like Kandinsky, to find a visual language that enables viewers to enter a doorway into the spiritual realm. Also, they are NOT abstract but as accurate a representation as I can make of mystical experience. 

I began studying Islamic art when in High School and grew to love the divine geometry used in tile decoration in all the great mosques.  I have made a pilgrimage to most of these mosques from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul I have knelt inside them, enclosed, it is like the patterns intrinsic to my soul have been transferred to the walls around me and I feel at peace.

Back at the Original Yellow House 1970/1 I painted the walls, ceiling and floor in a way that enabled audiences to sit in an altered mystical space and hear the stories of my puppets.  The symbolism being that our bodies are like a puppet glove and our soul the hand inside bringing them to life. Many of the puppet stories were adapted from the teaching tales of the Dervishes and I would often enter the space in exotic costume and whirl like a dervish.

The Anti-Vietnam war movement in the late 60’s and early 70’s was propelled by a cultural phenomenon where young people were on a journey of self-discovery. I would be in a bookshop and Herman Hesse’s story of Siddhartha would jump out at me and tell me to buy it. Then I would that all my friends had discovered it and were reading it at the same time. The military political establishment who were drafting my generation to fight in Vietnam would have seen this quest for esoteric knowledge as dangerous. The CIA invented LSD and released it into the youth population.  I didn’t try it but my friends had read Aldus Huxley’s book Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell and felt they had to experiment.  Suddenly all their hard-won spiritual knowledge was put down as product of psychedelic tripping and invalidated. Art from that period that was labelled as psychedelic has been ignored and trivialised. 

I am hoping that my Journey paintings can point a new generation, who are protesting against war, back to a path that leads to inner peace.  Inner peace and the peace that will come when wars end are inseparable.

Images courtesy of the artist.