IS MISERY A NECESSARY INGREDIENT FOR GREAT ART?
Recently I have been visiting art galleries in Europe and mesmerized by some of the masterful paintings on display. I am much more appreciative of art and culture in my fifties.
I’m realizing that all of us are carrying a masterpiece within us but we are blocking it from shining through. I know everyone is a masterpiece because the universe never gives birth to anything less than that. Some of the great masters like Van Gogh or Edvard Munch may have painted masterpieces without realizing that the core essence of who they are is also a masterpiece.
Did they create something outside themselves to understand who they are inside? Or was it random novelty? Did they look back at who they are, acknowledge their blind spots and realize that the masterpiece they created is from a limitless mysterious source within? Did they see that they were being guided to heal their past and transcend through art? Or were they trying to make their tortured artsy-self a cool hipster cultural identity?
It begs the question:
Why are a significant number of masterful artists from history tortured souls?
What were they missing? Not enough therapy? No Dharma? Forgot to dance? No family support? Poverty? What?
One of the paintings I recently saw was a reminder to look at the diamond essence within myself.
I wondered if this artist was a fragmented soul. Her bio read like a depressing soap opera but her painting was so magical and innocent.
To see the shimmering light inside, we sometimes have to see through our own soap operas, through layers upon layers of built up hurts, criticisms and repeating false stories. This filtering process of meditative looking might be exhausting but without it, we just keep trying to create the next personal masterpiece (great art, successful businesses, perfect lovers, more travel) over and over and over again only to realize that what we are striving for may have always been inside us to begin with.
Looking with the inner eye requires strength, perseverance and honest friends.
How do you strengthen yourself? Where do you go? What works? I am curious.
What I have witnessed is that many people are not satisfied with outer successes for too long. I have personally travelled to a lot of places on earth, have a rewarding job and fascinating friends but I am often unfulfilled. Now, after having some perspective living in Europe, I am really looking inward and understanding at the deepest level that happiness and fulfillment really come from within.
From a peaceful and grateful heart contentment arises.
I am seeing that I am a masterpiece not in an ego kind of way or I am better than you way but because this inner life graciously shown to me by many teachers is a flowing world of possibilities and dreams transmitting hunches, premonitions, flashes of insight and awesome creative ideas. Where did it all originate? We are a masterpiece that is forever changing. Not stuck in a museum.
An ego is never satisfied because it is bound by borders just like a painting but the inner masterpiece goes on forever and is forever enriching and kind. When I close my eyes and calm my mind, I am mesmerized by a world full of mystery, love, compassion, joy, colour, light, reflections and refractions. Coming to terms with this inner world seems to be the key to seeing that beautiful masterpieces are everywhere.
The suffering we sometimes feel is the frustrated masterpiece yearning to be expressed.
Masterpiece
Original Love
Infinite creativity
The core of every human being
Layers unravelling
Painting this strange beautiful world
A wide spectrum of human colour
yearning for an outlet
Nature invited us to play
Now she needs a break
Asking us to use our inner resources
Don’t kick her in the shin
Don’t silence her
She can no longer stand a world
where everyone has forgotten they are a perfect painting
Mona Lisa is less valuable than the most corrupt human
She is stuck in the frames of yesterday
Become a Buddha
Smile tomorrow
Cry 10 years from now
Question your ugliness on a lazy Sunday afternoon
Mona Lisa is a frozen peasant
Possessed by the pitfalls of wealth and adoration
A hungry ghost
Vagrants
priceless masterpieces
Criminals
priceless masterpieces
My enemies
priceless masterpieces
The angry child
a priceless masterpiece
Mona Lisa
Locked in a cold picture hell
Unfreeze yourself from the family fetters
You are a priceless impermanent masterpiece
Smile now!
Kiss the milky way
Laugh with the stars
Tickle the blood moon red
Human
Planets
Earth
Divine
Masterpieces
No difference
Expressions from the same source
Our views about who we are
Keep us separate
Keep us confused
Keep us chasing the spotted greyhound
Keep us dull
Keep us mad
Keep us from being alive
Smile Now!
Be Glad
You aren’t Mona Lisa
You’re an unpainted masterpiece
looking for an elusive home
-By Evangelos Diavolitsis-