Theseus

The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus' paradox, is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object which has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late first century. Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing each and every one of its wooden parts remained the same ship.

So when you are writing a poem. An influencing friend reads and suggests some changes. You make them because it makes the poem better. 
But which poem? The moment there is a change, it's a new one.

You make a piece of art. You sign it on the back. And then the ghosts of insecurities haunt you to sign it. And you do. Is it the same work now?

I can talk people out of suicide. (how I do it is my trade secret).
There is a man trying to throw away his life. I meet him, talk to him, and he changes his mind.
Did I interfere in the balance? Did i change the destiny? Or was his survival the destiny?

You have a brain and hands. The painting made is by whom - the brain or the hands.
The brain conceives it, the hands construct it. Who made it? 

Take this to teams - say Anish Kapoor makes an architectural art piece. Who makes it? He? Or his team?


....


it's a ship. and it sails.


....

making work

making work (i mean artwork) happen takes a lot.

when you want to make work about oneness, nothingness without being fraud, it's difficult.

no one can tell you what it is. so there is no guru.

or may be there are gurus, but when you are in eklavya method of learning, I find it better to not have one.

who will tell you what oneness is? you start looking inside your head where this weird thing came from. your habit of forgetting everything ensures that your head is formatted to learn what is oneness than say what it is. you can't remember when you heard this word first.

what is clear is a feeling that you can experience, that comes to you in your work. you have named it oneness, it might as well be called x. (but you are quite sure its oneness. because it somehow brings everything you are together, in a sharp pointed thing which you poke into the canvas and make art. or into your laptop to write words.)

That means you know what is oneness, and you don't know if that is all it is to oneness.
Can there be more? yes, there can be.
Have you experienced it totally? who knows.
Question is how will you ever know?

So you start. You can feel it, and now you want to see what you feel. So for that you have colours, lines, composition.

So how would you know how to use all of it? How to capture in visuals what you feel?

Start. Make. See. Discard. See. Discard. Make. See. Feel. Make...

Till you see it you won't know.

Till you make it you won't see. Or can you? in your mind? 

don't say a word

between the thought and execution, there is silence.
call it absence.
its a space where there is no action and no thought.
its a space beyond the action, beyond the thought.

is it contemplation? no, it's just nothing.

silence seeds detachment. it clears the mind.

when everything else disappears, there is nothingness.

if it's nothingness, can one feel it?
nothingness is as tangible as anything else.

one can feel a thing when one is aware of its existence. by that law, one can feel nothingness. one can touch nothingness. it can wrap one. one can taste it. one can hear it. with a bit of effort one can see it.

the moment one tried to sense nothingness, a thing gets added to it, thus bringing it to an end.

so seeing, feeling nothingness is an art in itself.
simply put, if one wants to experience nothingness, one has to dissolve oneself before touching it.

to experience nothingness, one has to become nothing. the self has to disappear.

it's not just the ego, the basic awareness of an entity called 'I' has to subside.

does it take effort? hell lot of effort. in which direction, in a direction of not making an effort.
weird. yes, but unless the mind and body are in absolute effortless, purposeless existence, one can not experience nothingness.

by the way, why experience nothingness at all?
there is actually no need.

nothingness is the most beautiful thing one can ever see, while being alive.

when i speak to a person, talk about any of this - i feel so empty. the worst part is i forget what i spoke. (in fact i forget everything i say)

terrible. but the saving grace is i am good at saying, "sorry, i forgot."

glass is no water

glass and water have the same colour. but the similarity ends there.

glass looks like glass, sounds like glass, feels like glass, breaks like glass.

water looks like water, sounds like water, feels like water, flows like water.

the two are different.

so what happens when you blow the water. or blow into the glass.

i don't need pictures here, because i just know how it looks then. you know it as well.

so, being an artist, if i want to show a broken blue plastic sheet, and i show it like a broken glass, the viewer will see it not as a plastic sheet, but made of a blue coloured glass.

and the viewer wont stop here. s/he will apply other properties of glass to it - like the 'ting', the sharpness.

if i show a hand on top, the viewer will see an image of blood.

with our experience of life, each of these nuances, which we would not know we know are so deep in our subconscious that fighting them with an image is just not possible, when the only means of communication is the picture itself.

Some artists like dali, used the melting clocks to depict time as he saw it (well, my interpretation). Like a continuum of seconds, dropping heavily to gravity thus feeling like something that at some point is bound to melt on the floor and vanish away / turn useless like a molten ice cream.

so while time melts away the memory, the picture persists. as is.

The question is, will a viewer carry his intuitions and preoccupations and all these details of materials and flows and sounds without having any awareness of the same when he views an abstract work.

i am sure he will. in fact more so because we are all scared of abstracts - the patterns we don't get, no  one answers what it is, it's outright ridiculous. his intuition is the only way he can make some sense before he runs away.

so when an abstract painter creates a work like this, people see water, light, shore, sky, universe, horizon, floating objects, because that is the way he has seen water reflecting or bird flying.

glass is no water.

recipe to goosebumps

so goosebumps is what i am chasing in my work.

love this definition of great work.
(i recently came across this same definition by Anjani bai Malpekar - Kumar Gandharva's Guru).
it's clear. it's perceivable. if it gives me goosebumps, it's great. if it doesn't it's not.

However it's not easily actionable.
how does one practice it? how does one make stuff that gives one goosebumps?

It won't lead to 'saleable' artwork.
(who will buy stuff that gives goosebumps? jokes apart - i am sure it's difficult to sell great work. it's deep, daring and appreciated by few - unless it becomes a trend - and it might take decades to reach the right people). Anyway, let's keep saleability aside. There are a thousand ways to earn money, but no one knows a thousand ways of doing great work.

So coming back to manufacturing goosebumps.
i decided to see what gives me goosebumps. in every field.
whatever make me feel it. decided to just put it down.

a concrete road. a piece of music by kumar. zen, clarity, the moment. calder, the tension. rand, the distillation. jobs, and intensity. rothko and oneness. gaitonde, the pure aesthetic. corbusier, the surface, the horizon. kahn, distillation. anish kapoor, width. rodin, thinker, the kiss : intensity again, rams: clarity.

not all the works by all these were great. but they produced /have produced some great work, consistently. what i saw in their works which give me goosebumps.

original. these works have no past, no future. they seem as if they are just born. swayambhu.

these works are one. they are not a sum of parts. there is not start, no end point. they are whole.

they don't talk. they meet your mind. they take your breath away.

they have an existence independent of the creator, the medium, the place and their elements. they have a life.

they are clarified. distilled.

these works are austere.

these are very inward looking, very deep and absolutely unaware of the world they exist in. (may be that's why they are timeless.)

swatantra. sampurna. ekjeev. jivanta.

the recipe to goosebumps. 

monet and goosebumps

what's great art? one that gives you goosebumps. nothing less. nothing more.

i saw monet's water lilies in musee l'orangerie with goosebumps.
i knew nothing about monet then.
i didnt know he painted waterlilies.
i went and saw the egg shaped gallery with three huge paintings.
huge. i went close. i went far. i felt nothing.

then i stood in the place where yolk stands.
and i saw it. endless.

i was standing in the middle of a lake.
it was lake, lake and only lake. right till the horizon.
weeping willows and water lilies, everywhere.

i was standing in the lake.
goosebumps.

i will never forget the goosebumps.
i can not state why i got goosebumps.
was it a discovery, a feeling or something else that triggered them.

i just remember them.
that day i felt what art can do.

without any reason or logic, without any barrier art can take you away.

no defence works then.
no comprehension, no language, no interpretation.

any anything less than that, is not art.
what is incapable of giving me goosebumps, is not art.
goosebumps to me, because i can't fake them.

(was trying to find a photograph / video with them : but that will be such a let down.
go and see it.)