the feeling of life

I'm looking at these two images. At first I didn't have any particular thoughts about them. They were a response to pairs of people moving in space.

But as time has gone on I've begun to see them as a development, a move towards something that I've been interested for a long time. This something is the visual plane of Indian mural art from various periods; starting with the earliest known paintings from Ajanta, which date from the 2nd century BCE to about 480 or 650 CE, and including the Mattancheri mural paintings, painted in the 16th century, which I visited in Karnataka in 2014.

Here are some early paintings from Ajanta:

And some murals from Mattacheri:

It's hard to mention these without saying something about Indian aesthetics. The opposite of our plain Greek aesthetic which appreciates unadorned walls and simplicity, Indian art celebrates fecundity, teeming life... curling in the form of creepers and blossoms, humans and animals together, everything crammed into a packed two dimensional space which has no interest in accurately representing three dimensional reality.

Indian aesthetics is concerned with feeling. Raw emotion - plays and poems and miniature paintings were designed to not only 'portray' emotions such as loss and love and longing, but to actively evoke these feelings in the audience (the theory of rasa). The crowded murals of the ancient caves and more recent palaces create the feeling of the teeming, interconnected nature of a world jammed full of interrelated life forms...

None of this was in my mind when I made these paintings. But that Indian aesthetic is my aesthetic, is what I'm interested in. I've been thinking for so long about how to approach it. But any kind of direct approach seems to be quite hopeless for me. Instead, I have to wait, and see. Today, this is what I see.

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