Painting
THEME/S
Dhanavanti
Dhanavanti joined the ashram of Sri Aurobindo as a child in 1943, when the Mother opened the school of the ashram. She has been living there since then.
She took to drawing and painting in 1956. Nature was a constant source of joy and inspiration - flowers, landscapes, birds, animals all had their charm. But what she loved most is the human being - the human body so full of grace and strength, the human face with its ever changing expressions. Portraits were her favourites and sketching from life - to catch in a few lines the various moods and modes of life, the movement and the throb, to gather life in from everywhere and everyone.
But a time came when this gathering in did not satisfy her. There was an urge to search within and to find. And the urge grew more and more intense. She continued to paint of course, but in a very different direction. What we see to-day are the results of this inner search.
'The heavens beyond are great and wonderful, but greater and more wonderful are the heavens within you' said Sri Aurobindo
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to whom she inwardly dedicated all her work.
'There is' - as one of her critics remarked - 'a reflection in her paintings of the consciousness of the mystical world'.
'The source of her inspiration is the awareness of the great ether. Truly speaking there is in Dhanavanti's paintings a colourful and beautiful manifestation of the awareness of the cosmic world, which is the world of her spiritual ideas. The way in which she has used colours betray an exceptional genius
'Mystery surrounds her corn positions - ideas tending to-wards a beyond. Her paintings can be accepted as extraordinary works of art.'
The paintings are not the illustrations of the cited verses, but they are given as significant titles by the artist to the original paintings.
The publisher
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It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, ...
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge .
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god.
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In this high signal moment of the gods
Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss
A greatness from our other countries came ...
A mediating ray has touched the earth
Bridging the gulf between man's mind and God's;
Translating heaven into a human shape
Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown.
A spirit of its celestial source aware
Descended into earth's imperfect mould ...
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This is the sailor on the flow of Time,
This is World-Matter's slow discoverer,
Who, launched into this small corporeal birth,
Has learnt his craft in tiny bays of self, ...
In his world-adventure's crude initial start Behold him
A creature born to bend beneath the yoke,
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A long dim preparation is man's life,
A circle of toil and hope and war and peace
Tracked out by Life on Matters obscure ground
In his climb to a peak no feet have ever trod,
He seeks through a penumbra shot with flame
A veiled reality half-known, ever missed,
A search for something or someone never found,
Cult of an ideal never made real here,
An endless spiral of ascent and fall
Until at last is reached the giant point
Through which his Glory ... shines for whom we were made
And we break into the infinity of God.
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A Heart was felt in the spaces wide and bare,
A burning Love from white spiritual founts ...
Too high the fire spiritual dare not blaze.
If once it met the intense original Flame,
An answering touch might shatter all measures made
And earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite.
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Always the Ideal beckoned from afar.
Awakened by the touch of the Unseen,
Deserting the boundary of things achieved,
Aspired the strong discoverer, ...
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As so he grew into his larger self,
Humanity framed his movements less and less,
A greater being saw a greater world.
A fearless will for knowledge dared to erase
The lines of safety reason draws that bar
Mind's soar, soul's dive into the Infinite.
Even his first steps broke our small earth-bounds
And loitered in a vaster, freer air.
The landmarks of the little person fell,
The island ego joined its continent:
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A conscious frame was here, a self-born Force.
Overpassed was this world of rigid limiting forms:
Life's barriers opened into the Unknown.
Abolished were conception's covenants
And, striking off subjection's rigorous clause
Annulled the soul's treaty with Nature's nescience.
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A Will, a hope immense now seized his heart,
And to discern the superhuman's form
He raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights, ...
The glory he had glimpsed must be his home.
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At last the traveller in the paths of Time
Arrives on the frontiers of eternity.
In the transient symbol of humanity draped,
He feels his substance of undying self
And loses his kinship to mortality.
A beam of the Eternal smites his heart, ...
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Truth unpartitioned found immense sky-room;
An empyrean vision saw and knew;
The bounded mind became a boundless light,
The finite self mated with Infinity.
His march now scared into an eagle's flight.
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The gulf twixt the depths and the heights is bridged
And the golden waters pour
Down the sapphire mountain rainbow-ridged
And glimmer from shore to shore.
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He who I am was with me still;
All veils are breaking now.
I have heard His voice and borne His will
On my vast untroubled brow.
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