A life in living colour

I’ve been painting since around the age of ten. I began with coating my model airplanes, Spitfires and Stuka dive bombers with camouflage colours. I grew up a short walk away from Glasgow’s marvellous Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and visited the place most weekends, not to admire the many beautiful paintings exhibited there, but rather to check out the girls. It was a teenyboppers’ hang out spot. Nonetheless, I do believe that some of the masterpieces displayed in the immense building’s viewing galleries left an impression on my young mind, in particular Dali’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross, which the master surrealist painted in 1951, the year of my birth.

The closest I ever came to art school was in 1970, when I worked for several months as an artist’s model to fund my first overland to India journey. It was quite a trip, sitting there naked on a Monday morning, coming down from a weekend-long LSD session. I can recall the clouds in the sky drifting by outside the massive windows and how fascinating I found them. The art students’ up and down head movements, while they drew or painted my likeness, reminded me of sparrows, pecking at bread crumbs. I suppose that period of sitting and standing silently doing nothing for hours on end was my introduction into the world of meditation.

During my incarnation as an acid-dropping hippie, I was enthralled by psychedelic art. My favourite artists of the time were ‘The Fool’, a Dutch design collective, and Mati Klarwein, who created the cover for Santana’s Abraxus album and also the covers for Miles Davis’ Bitch’s Brew and Live-Evil.

I took sannyas in March 1975. During that time, Poona was an inexpensive place to live but, for a low budget dropout like me, it was expensive. I had to innovate to improve my financial circumstances. At one point I was doing Picasso-style portraits of mostly Indian sannyasins for 5 rupees a pop. The water colour paintings were often absurd and grotesque and, going by their laughter, my Indian customers seemed to find them highly amusing.

My fascination with paint and colour slowly evolved into a profession that I could earn money from. Not a lot, but enough. From the late eighties into the new millennium I hosted several international exhibitions, in Germany, Holland, Spain and the UK. Then everything changed on 26 December 2004.

I was on the South-West coast of Sri Lanka when the tsunami thundered in. It was a life-changing encounter with the massive power of Mother Nature in a destructive mood, which turned out to be a positive, life-affirming experience. Subsequent to that, I travelled to Cambodia. It was there that I accidentally wandered into a minefield. I got out of there in one piece by treading carefully on a motorbike tyre track. I thought, I have to write about this. And thus my career as a novelist began. I now have several books published under the name Luke Mitchell.

I find that, of all the creative arts, writing is the most absorbing. Perhaps too absorbing. My partner found herself living with a recluse. Nonetheless, I kept my hand in with painting and produced many Australian aborigine-style dot paintings, which is what I became known for in the art dimension.

Now, I am developing a graphic-style psychedelic art form, which coincides with the psychedelic renaissance currently taking place globally. On an existential level, Indian gurus have been supplanted by South American shamans and perception-altering teacher plants. I’m not ambitious, and I see that as a good thing because, as Osho so rightly said, “When ambition enters, creativity disappears.” ¹ Just give me a canvas, acrylic paint, a few brushes and the sky is not the limit.

Storytelling! That is how I see my paintings. They are stories. Each one unique with a psychedelic thread running through them. That’s my story. A life in living colour.

“Particularly, I want my people to know that meditation is not just being silent, that is only one part of it. Finally, it has to be creative. And when poetry comes out of your inner silences, or a painting, it has a flavour which is not of this world.” ²
Osho,

Source of Osho’s quotes

1. A Sudden Clash of Thunder, Ch 4, Q 1
2. The Miracle, Ch 10

Links

• Contact: thetyroseries@gmail.com
• Books:
  Mind Bomb – amazon.com
  Borderline Dreamtime – amazon.com
  Sagara – amazon.com
  Jake Knox – amazon.com
• Video spoof: youtube.com
• Documentary: youtube.com
• Music:
  Tan Tan Tanit – soundcloud.com
  Tomorrow Never Comes… – soundcloud.com

The artwork was photographed by Patricia Ramaer (patriciaramaergallery.com)

Lokesh

Lokesh (Luke Mitchell) is a writer and artist. (links above)