Inner Constellations Process Notes
Inner Constellations was borne out of a longing for change. The process of creating layers within a painting has always been a way for me to let go of precious ideas, but I wanted to do this in a bigger way. I needed a whole change of thinking. It wasn’t just about creating transitions within a painting.
Rudolf Steiner expresses the necessity of change this way: ” We could never BE because we are always BECOMING “. One of the best lessons I have learned from studying Buddhism is that suffering exists in our consciousness and that freedom from suffering lies in the malleability of our consciousness. There is something comforting about that. Nothing is still and everything is in flux. Since we are constantly changing anyway, I have dedicated my spiritual as well as my art practice towards directing that change.
There is an art therapy exercise I do when I have to go through a big transition in my life. The process involves creating 9 watercolour paintings that depict 9 scenes from sunset to sunrise. I start with one painting showing a 5:30pm scene and then a 7:30pm scene, and so forth until I get to the 9:30am painting. It is meant to guide one’s consciousness through incremental change from darkness to light. I decided to do my own version of this exercise through 9 layered, large scale acrylic paintings. The work of creating these 9 Inner Constellation paintings was my process of becoming. Each painting marks a stage, a point of departure to the next. The motion of change happens in the space between the paintings. Just like music happens in the space between the notes. It was a way to guide my consciousness forward, appreciating each stage of evolution I was in and distilling the gifts of each stage of change into a painting.
Although going from sunset to sunrise might seem like a journey from darkness to light, the most important insight I got from Inner Constellations is that darkness and light are not opposites. They are degrees of the same thing. I was surprised to find some beautiful light in the process of creating the darkest parts of night. At the same time, it was a great relief to get to a new kind of light by the 7th , 8th and 9th painting— in the same way that the inhale must become an exhale at some point. I knew that it wasn’t so much about arriving at a resolution. It was just about enjoying each aspect of evolution.
For this series of work, I needed to place the figures within space. In order to depict a sense of the changing of time, I had to use aspects of space, atmosphere, weather. I had to shift the notion of time from a series of numbers on a clock and place it in the bigger context of planetary movement— a movement of bodies in space. Change overlapping change, layer over layer. Each painting in the Inner Constellation series celebrates each stage of transformation but also holds within these layers the idea of time passing, a perception of the process of becoming.