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The Mother - the Divine Artist
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Sri Aurobindo
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The Divine puts on an appearance of humanity, assumes the outward human nature in order to tread the path and show it to human beings, but does not cease to be Divine. It is a manifestation that takes place, a manifestation of a growing divine consciousness, not human turning into divine. The Mother was inwardly above the human even in childhood...
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The Mother once said that She began to draw at the age of eight and started to learn oil painting and other painting techniques when She was ten. She added on another occasion that at twelve She was already doing portraits.
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The Mother - All aspects of beauty..
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All aspects of beauty, but particularly music and painting, fascinated me. I went through a very intense vital development during that period, with, just as in my early years, the presence of a kind of inner Guide; and all centered on studies: the study of sensations, observations, the study of technique, comparative studies, even a whole spectrum of observations dealing with
taste, smell and hearing - a kind of classification of experiences. And this extended to all facets of life, all the experiences life can bring, all of them - miseries, joys, difficulties, sufferings, everything - oh, a whole field of studies! And always this Presence within, judging, deciding, classifying,
organising and systematising everything.
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The Great Secret - a play written by The Mother.
Synopsis: Six world-famous men find themselves in a life-boat when the ship carrying them to a world Conference on Human Progress sinks in the middle of the ocean. The men are: the Statesman, the Writer, the Scientist, the Artist, the Industrialist, the Athlete and a seventh man - the Unknown Man. As provisions get exhausted and there is no hope
of rescue, there is despair and each one narrates the story of his life. The Mother Herself wrote the monologues of the Artist and the Unknown man.
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Extract from The Mother's (seemingly autobiographical) script of the Artist
"I was born in a bourgeois family, quite respectable, where art was considered rather as a
pastime than a career and the artists as not very serious people, inclined to debauchery and contemptuous of money, a rather dangerous thing. I felt, perhaps out of a spirit of contradiction, a compelling need to become a painter. My entire
consciousness was centered in my eyes and I could express myself more easily
through a sketch than through words. I learnt much better by looking at pictures than by reading books; what I saw once - landscapes, human faces or drawings - I never forgot. At the age of thirteen, I had almost mastered,
through much effort, the technique of drawing, water colour, pastel and oil painting. I had occasion then to do some paid work for friends and
acquaintances of my parents. As I began to earn money, my family too began looking upon my vocation seriously. I took the opportunity to make a
through study of the subject. When I attained the required age, I joined the School of Fine Arts and almost immediately stood for the Prix de Rome competition and came out first. I was one of the youngest of the laureates. That gave me the opportunity to acquaint myself thoroughly with Italian art....
I am not satisfied. My conception of genius is quite different. One must create new forms, with new means and processes to express a higher and purer, truer and nobler beauty of a new type. So long as I feel myself tied to humanity I cannot be freed completely from the forces of material Nature."
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The Mother - The discipline of Art..
The discipline of Art has at its centre the same principle as the discipline of Yoga. In both the aim is to become more and more conscious; in both you have to learn to see and feel something that is beyond the ordinary vision and feeling, to go within and bring out from there deeper things. Painters have to follow a discipline for the growth of the consciousness of their eyes, which in itself is almost a Yoga. If they are true artists and try to see beyond and use their art for the expression of the inner world, they grow in consciousness by this concentration, which is not other than the consciousness given by Yoga.
......
There is a considerable amount of difference between the vision of the
ordinary people and the vision of the artists. Their way of seeing
things is much more complete and conscious than that of ordinary people.
When one has not trained one's vision, one sees vaguely, imprecisely,
and has impressions rather than an exact vision. An artist, when he sees
something and has learned to use his eyes - for instance, when he sees a
figure, instead of seeing just a form, like that, you know, a form, the
general effect of a form, of which he can vaguely say that this person
resembles or does not much resemble what he sees - sees the exact
structure of the figure, the proportions of the different parts, whether
the figure is harmonious or not, and why; and also of what kind or type
or form it is; all sorts of things at one glance, you understand, in a
single vision, as one sees the relations between different forms
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The Mother - The Yogin's aim..
The Yogin's aim in the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital gratification, but, seeing the Divine everywhere, worshipping it with a revelation of the meaning of its works, to express that One Divine in god and men and creatures and objects.
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The Mother - Art is a means..
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But when you are in Yoga, there is a profound change in the value of things, of Art as of everything else; you begin to look at Art from a very different standpoint. It is no longer the one supreme all-engrossing thing for you, no longer an end in itself. Art is a means, not an end; it is a means of expression. And the artist then ceases too to believe that the whole world turns round what he is doing or that his work is the most important thing that has ever been done. His personality counts no longer; he is an agent, a channel, his art a means of expressing his relations with the Divine.
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Vividly does one of Her disciples remember what She spoke apropos Her own paintings. Himself an amateur with the brush, he was acutely concerned with the thoughtless scatter of her best work over many countries. She mentioned a decade in which She had done Her finest painting and said that most of the pieces had been given away to various people at different times and in different places.
The disciple said: "Should we not do something to collect them again?"
The Mother calmly replied: "Why? Is it so important?"
"Surely, such masterpieces deserve to be found and kept safely. You had taken so much pains over them".
"It does not matter"
"But, Mother, don't you think there will be a loss if they are not preserved?"
Then the Mother, with eyes far away yet full of tenderness for the agitated disciple, said in a quiet half-whisper: "You know, we live in eternity"
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The Mother - O Lord of Beauty...
In the world of forms a lack of Beauty is a fault as great as a lack of Truth in the world of
ideas. For Beauty is the homage which Nature renders to the Supreme Master of the universe; Beauty is the divine language in the form. A consciousness of the Divine which is not externally translated by an understanding and an expression of Beauty would be an incomplete consciousness.
But true Beauty is as difficult to discover, to understand and, above all, to live as any other expression of the Divine; this discovery and this expression demand as much impersonality and abdication of egoism as the discovery of Truth and Bliss. Pure Beauty is universal, and one must be universal in order to see and recognise it.
O Lord of Beauty, how many faults I have committed against Thee, how many faults I still commit!... Give me a perfect understanding of Thy Law, so that I may no longer fall short of it. Love would be incomplete without Thee; Thou art one of its most perfect ornaments, Thou art one of its most harmonious smiles. Sometimes I have misunderstood Thy role, but in the depth of my heart I have always loved Thee. And even the most arbitrary, the most radical doctrines have not been able to extinguish the fire of the cult which, since my childhood, I have vowed to Thee.
Thou art not what a vain people think of Thee, Thou art not exclusively attached to any particular form of life: it is possible to awaken Thee, to make Thee shine in every form; but for this one must have discovered Thy secret.
O Lord of Beauty, give me a perfect understanding of Thy Law, that I might not fail in it and that Thou mayst become in me the harmonious crown of the Lord of Love.
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The Mother
In everything, everywhere, in all relations truth must be brought out in its all-embracing rhythm and every movement of life should be an expression of beauty and harmony. Skill is not art, talent is not art. Art is a living harmony and beauty that must be expressed in all the movements of existence. This manifestation of beauty and harmony is part of the Divine realisation upon earth, perhaps even its greatest part.
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The Mother as an artist - brief sketch
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The Mother did not give her personal career as an artist a primary importance. Hence it is not commonly known that she was an accomplished artist.
..The Mother (Mirra Alfassa, 1878-1973) loved to draw and paint from her childhood. Though art was only one
of her many interests, it occupied a prominent place in her early life. She began to take drawing lessons at the age of eight. Two years later she started to learn oil painting and other painting techniques. By the time she was twelve she was doing
portraits. In 1892, when she was fourteen, one of her charcoal drawings was exhibited at the International "Blanc et Noir" Exhibition in Paris.
Having completed her regular schooling at the age of fifteen, she joined an art studio in Paris to study painting. In all likelihood it belonged to the Academie Julian, an organistaion with several studios founded by Rudolphe Julian in the latter part of the nineteenth century....
....The Mother continued to work in this studio until 1879, when she married the artist Henri Morisset. During the next few years, she participated in the stimulating artistic life of turn-of-the-century Paris and associated with some of the leading artists of the period. She did a fair amount of painting, both in Paris, where she and Morisset had their flat with a studio in the garden, and on trips to the countryside. Six of her works were exhibited in the prestigious Salon de la Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1903,1904 and 1905...
...Only about forty of the Mother's paintings are available to us today. More than half of these belong to her early years in
France (before 1914, when she made her first trip to India), including her visits to Algeria (1906 and 1907). Other early works, which she considered to be among her best, were either sold or presented to friends and are now lost to us. The Mother also did a number of paintings and drawings while she was in Japan, between 1916 and 1920. There she acquired the Japanese technique of watercolour painting, working directly with brush and black India ink. When she returned to India in 1920, she brought with her seven paintings and some drawings
which she had done in Japan.
In Pondicherry, the Mother rarely had time to undertake oil paintings. Her spiritual work and practical responsibilities became all-absorbing and she preferred to bring out latent artistic faculties in others rather than display her own abilities. But she did
quite a few drawings of the highest quality and artistic value. There are many portraits. Those who saw her doing the portraits describe how within minutes, with a few rapid strokes, a living face would be completed.
....It must be remembered that even from childhood the Mother was conscious of a larger mission to which art and all other
interests were subordinate. Art was for her a valuable part of life, but not the most important thing. It was the language which came naturally to her, and she used it as a means of expression and communication in the course of her work with people. For her, images could often reveal more than words. She regarded her art study in her early years as a discipline for developing the consciousness, not as a preparation for a brilliant career or a life dedicated to art for art's sake. Once she
had mastered painting to a sufficient degree for her purposes, she moved on to other things...
The Mother's paintings and drawings
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