intuitiveflow

Lost in infinity

This is about looking up, while meditating or imagining. It is a good idea, and a strange thing too, as in an infinite field, where there cannot be any place that is different from another, there is no middle, no side, no up and no down.

So looking up belongs to the relative world. Some time ago I was advised by inner guidance to look to the sides, when I dive into imaginary spaces, instead of looking straight forwards. It was a smart advice. I discovered a whole now experience. And maybe this is the beginning training of me in getting used to infinity. There is indeed so much more in it, and the way we focus in infinity is totally different. We do not hold a narrow view. We have the view of all.

And when I looked up at first in meditation, I discovered again a new world. And this is what I started to depict here.

Of course, it is: bringing the relative perspective into the infinite reality.

In my imagination it looked different at first. It looked like a scene into which you could penetrate deeper and deeper, passing bodies of something on the way, going beyond them, passing other bodies, and so on. Here I have some form in the middle, as if it is a three dimensional form. You may get the feeling that it is a kind of a giant. You are looking from the level of the knees and far ahead there is the head. Then it may even look as if this head is looking down at you. As much as I wanted to lose my earthly perspective, it came through. I could not get rid of it. In a way it endears this perspective to me. Like a child that you, impatiently, want to convince to do something that is more comfortable for you to deal with, but the child stubbornly wants to go at that thing from his perspective. At first you get annoyed, but you end up listening. If he insists so strongly, you think, let me listen carefully, because there is something in it for him, and it is important for him so much that he opposes me. Let me see what it is.

So who is the child in this case?

It is the earthly perspective. The way we experience and interpret the world around us. There is always a point in a specific place in the space that I know, from which the view is taken. There is also the issue of bigger and smaller, and the world will compel you to pay attention to these differences, as they have something to do with your safety. If the giant is your friend, then he’d rather be big and strong. But if he is of an unknown orientation…

When you look at the individual spots, some of them seem to be closer to you, and some are farther. This is due to the color and the surrounding colors. If you look at the area of what would be the chest, the dark blue area seems to be an opening into an unknown depth. The purple seems to come toward us. And the green is deep but not so deep as the dark blue. These differences break the solidity of the form, and I wanted this effect to be in the art, to confuse the usual way of relating to forms and background. I wanted you to know that what you are looking at is not what you thought it was.

The white parts can be seen as objects painted in white, as we do sometimes in our reality, but also as areas that were not touched by the power of the colors. They have not been swayed off balance to be close or far, warm or cold, friendly or hostile. So they remained points of reference, like the test groups in scientific experiments that let you know how things will behave without the influence of the foreign element that you introduce.

So you now start to have the feeling of what this painting is about. It is about being uncertain as for where things are, of the integrity of forms, of background and foreground. You are still with a few of the perceptual habits of an earthling, but your trust in your reality starts to falter.

And it is fascinating indeed. The fascination will take you through the unfamiliar. And it will take you to where everything has the same importance. What comes to mind in this context is the music of Schoenberg indeed. The invention of the twelve-tone music did the same service to music that this artwork does to visual perception. In the traditional structure of a scale there are more important tones and less important ones. The home tone is the most important, and it creates the adventure. We go far from it and feel uncomfortable. We come back and relax. This is the relative world. We, humans gave the importance to some of the places, because this was our perception of reality. Places have relative importance and everything else has relative importance as well. In Schoenberg’s music this relativity is lost. You are placed in an unformed space musically, where it is hard to know where you want to be. You can struggle and try to reach something that will resemble the familiar home, but you can’t really find it. So you get used to having no home. And when your worry subsides, you start to play. You try to put things in different orders. And you know that the orders that you create are temporary and not substantial. But they give you pleasure and activate your curiosity to go on trying other combinations.

So now, do you have a better sense of this artwork?