Wednesday 28 September 2011

The good Bad and the bad Good


Painting: The good Bad and the bad Good
Date: 24th August 2011
Medium: Acrylic colors on A3 canvas

My thoughts:
It is a bright summer afternoon. Yellow is dancing with the orange – the two flow across while playing with the rough texture of the canvas. Sunrays expose the excitement of the green foliage, which is now spreading its fragrance on the canvas. I close my eyes trying to fathom the contents of the fragrance – flowers, foliage, sea, breeze… Life is so good – no constraints, no chains, no bad. Ironic it is! Good thoughts give rise to the excitement of the absence of the bad, which in turn reinforces the belief in the presence of the bad… The bright day will inevitably decay into the dark night. Soon the light blue bright summer sky melted into the starry dark blue and the all absorbing black. The blue and black now violently struggle on the limited space of the canvas. But why am I afraid of the dark? Is Bad so bad? The turmoil on the canvas decrease…
I look around to understand what good is Good for. Let’s do an experiment! I search for the most lively and beautiful thing around. There it is – a bright red hibiscus! I plead the canvas to answer my dilemma. Delicately the flower is absorbed by the canvas. As I wait patiently to see what happens to the lively flower when it is swallowed by the Bad and the Good, my confusion starts heightening. Five minutes.Ten.Twleve. Sixteen. At twenty, the canvas shocks me. The stem of the flower starts growing form the Bad, the black. It is burning to live. Its celestial light glows incessantly. I could hear it breathing, living, and surviving in the dark. It loves the challenge, lights the dark and leaves the world awe-struck. As it grows into the light of the Good, the stem lazily bends down. The flower growing on it is sluggish, tired and bent in the nothing-to-do world. Life is too easy to be challenging in the Good to be good. Is the Good really good and Bad really bad? I take a deep breath, almost thanking the canvas to sensitize me to the possibility of the absence of absolutes – the good Good and the bad Bad. If there is no good Good… the Bad is good and Good is bad, what is Good at all? I contain the question in myself, what’s the fun in easy solvable questions if they can be solved!
As I walk back Dillard’s words resonate in my mind. “She burnt for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning – only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame faced virgin gone to God, while I read in her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”[1]

[1] Annie Dillard: Death of a Moth. Harper Magazine (1976)

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