When we talk of art we need to talk of love

Awakening the eye is admitting the love and enquiry into self
to guide us back to harmony.

– Rashid Maxwell

Rashid Maxwell embodies my idea of a Renaissance man. His profile reads like a prompt for a writers’ course where the task is to create a character both credible and unlikely.  (There are many threads that run parallel to my own – perhaps that’s why I relate so keenly to the way his life has unfolded.) He was never a candidate for the typical, mundane and mediocre, but followed his innate thirst for truth – the truth of life and the truth of his wide-ranging creativity.

He is a published writer and poet as well as an exhibiting artist, art lecturer and pioneer in the field of art as therapy. He not only designs furniture, but also meditation spaces and eco-environmental projects – including a park, a reafforestation venture, a wetland bird sanctuary and a nature reserve. Having lived and worked in many countries he now resides in rural Devon, England, where he practices organic gardening, keeps bees, continues to draw and paint, and to walk – as he puts it – “the pathless path of inner exploration.”

For the artisans’ gallery, Rashid has contributed a selection of watercolour paintings inspired by the Love that flows beneath our everyday passions – Paramananda, the bliss beyond bliss.

Love is the way

When we talk of art we need to talk of love.
In truth, when we talk of anything we need to talk of love.

There’s a love we hardly know about that underlies the love we always talk about – that isn’t always love. Sometimes this undercover love is known as ‘risking everything’ or ‘seeing for the first time’ or ‘rendered speechless’ or ‘time stands still’ or ‘freedom from oneself’ or ‘the intimate unknown.’

This love enrols us and enfolds us when we dedicate ourselves whole heartedly and single-mindedly to anything we do; making love and even making war, digging holes and driving the car, cleaning, cooking, writing music, sitting listening to the rain.

When we talk of art we are talking about love. Love is the hidden innards of all the art that has endured, just as it is the overt message of all the sages who have ever lived. This love we also meet in a baby’s eyes and wherever we look in nature: its intimate partner is called meditation – finding out who and what we really are – now emergent from the monasteries and moving in the market place.

The rising tide of dire disaster that surrounds us is the outer shape of our inner loss of love. Awakening the eye is admitting the love and enquiry into self to guide us back to harmony.

I call this series of watercolour paintings Paramananda*. They have been prompted by expressions of this love that I observed in people who have meditation in their lives. Sometimes they are dancing, sometimes sitting silently, sometimes passing through grave illness and sometimes waiting for their lover. If these images transmit to you a figment of that underlying love, love has done its work.

Rashid Maxwell, 22 08 17

theawakenedeye.com – images and text copyright Rashid Maxwell, courtesy of the artist

*Paramananda: beyond bliss.

Rashid is a regular contributor – rashidmaxwell.com
Rashid’s published poetry includes: Not Knowing Guides Our Feet; Life Is One Blessed Thing After Another; and Everything Is Something Else. Check them out on amazon.com.
All articles by this author on Osho News

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Rashid: In the Tiger’s Mouth – Rashid tells us his story, about growing up in Britain, his studies at Oxford and Chelsea Art School – and how he came to Osho