#107
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#107 © vesna milinkovic 2009
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#107 © vesna milinkovic 2009
The Annunciate, incorporeal being in blue, witness of Passion.Gabriel, 2009
acrylic on canvas
100cm x 100cm
A new abstract painting
by Vesna Milinkovic, also available as a gicleé print, online at
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Ink on Paper
11 works
11 months
born NOV 2009: 11:11
conceived JAN 2009: 1:11
1st full moon of the year
another heavenly body
Neil Armstrong APOLLO 11
21 DEC 2012 @ 11:11am
end of Mayan Calendar
WE: the human race
The 11th Hour
appears 11 times in The New Testament
illumination:illumination
Round, like the heavenly bodies that govern the measurement of time.
Movement: Guido Mocafico
PROJECT 11:11 has been inspired by
11:11
In The Shadow Of The Moon: Ron Howard
Movement: Guido Mocafico
PROJECT 11:11 now available on-line @ VESNA ABSTRACT>ART>INK ON PAPER
Why spiritual art?
Why not just art?
You’re weird aren’t you… you’re one of those?
Back in early 2000 and something, I did a couple years of undergraduate study in philosophy with The Open University. I was really excited about it. I experienced an amazing first year exploring The Human Situation, and my second year was a focus on the field I love the most… art.
What could possibly go wrong?
I was really organised, mind-maps at the ready, prepping from word go for my end of year exam.
While almost having completed the course, I spent one evening reviewing my notes. In doing so, I became aware of feeling intensely frustrated; I realised that I didn’t believe in any of the information I was willingly committing to memory.
When it came to exploring the question What Is Art?, nothing I had been instructed to read came even close to tapping the truth. At the time, I couldn’t quite grasp what the truth might look like… but I knew it was out there, like space… another frontier, hopefully not so final. This particular realisation came as a bit of a blow at the time, which presented me with a dilemma. Do I memorise utterly useless information and outdated concepts for the sake of passing my second year, or do I quit now before I do any lasting damage to my synapses?
I decided that encouraging my ability to think for myself was more important, and so I defiantly boycotted the exam.
While I continued to read the odd bit of Bertrand Russell, my imagination was being gently captivated by the metaphysics section of the book store. One mind-bending book led to another, which would thus lead to another five, and so on, multiplying like rabbits on Viagra. Years later, my home resembles some strange landscape of totem stalagmites, made entirely of books, depositing in obscure places, and in alternate subject layers of art and spirituality.
A good friend and Demartini practitioner said to me ‘ten minutes in a persons home and I’ll tell them exactly what their life purpose is.’
Well. It took me a little longer than ten minutes. Try ten years.
I now realise that the frontier had come to me; a precipitated truth in the shape of book deposits. The concept of spirituality in art was now dripping upwards from my book totems and slowly crystallizing between my ears.
Synchronously, in the summer of 2006, Tate Modern exhibited The Path To Abstraction, an impressive collection of 80 Kandinsky works charting his journey through The Blue Rider group and Bauhaus periods. The Tate describes Wassily Kandinsky as;
‘a modernist master’ who ‘began to conceive of painting as an alternative pathway to spiritual reality… In abstraction, Kandinsky felt that he had discovered a spiritual reality which was more powerful for not being tied to the outside world – an alternative music for the senses.’
This was one art exhibition I felt compelled to visit. Even so, it was yet another two years before I read Kandinsky’s seminal work, Concerning The Spiritual In Art. The artist explores concepts of inner resonance or vibration of the soul as spiritual experience, facilitated by art, specifically the cause and effect of painting and colour on the soul.
It began to dawn on me that art and spirituality, within the current context of western culture, generally appear to be presented to us with an inference of mutual exclusivity. Mixing the two feels very much taboo. While there has been a renaissance in mind body spirit associated subjects in the past decade, there seems to be a black hole when it comes to serious exploration of the spiritual within art. This only serves to highlight, not only the significance of Kandinsky’s work, but the courage it must have taken to propose such theories, especially in a time devoid of the spiritual awakening we are now experiencing.
The spiritual in art is a part of every indigenous culture, indeed the indigenous Way is one of Spirit which guides every aspect of life, and is therefore inseparable from their higher forms of expression. This is not a new concept, this is an ancient practice that has been marginalised (as have the indigenous) in the race for egoic power. However, times are a changing, the feminine principle is making her presence felt, we are in the throws of rediscovering our spiritual roots once again. This is the early train to recovery, destination: Spirit.
Michelangelo is quoted as having said ‘the true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.’ This implies a creativity that strives for such perfection. Our creations can only ever be a reflection of our true state. It is impossible to escape the reality of what we have created for ourselves thus far, and yet it is entirely possible, critical even, that we take responsibility for our creations. Only then can we truly expect to elevate ourselves from mere struggle for survival. It is in the striving, the creative process, that we reach for a better version of ourselves. It is time that we recognise, openly acknowledge, and celebrate the relationship between art and spirituality, contrary to what society would have us believe, as inseparable. Like Picasso once said, ‘God is really only another artist.’
Last night, in the spirit of Halloween, I walked into the darkness of How It Is, the Miroslaw Balka installation at Tate Modern. Moving up the ramp and into the blackness, slowly placing one foot in front of the other, I was hyper-aware of the symbolic significance of this experience. Balka writes;
How shall I move forward? you might ask yourself, as you stand at the threshold, confronted by the darkness ahead. The unknown can be terrifying, especially if it is also without light. How you approach it is unique, as your first encounter with anything can only ever be as an individual. Staring ahead into the black void may make you wonder whether to move ahead at all.

How It Is was inspired by the Samuel Beckett novel by the same name, published in 1964. Beckett conjures the image of a ‘man lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his ‘life’ as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him… The noise of his panting fills his ears and it is only when this abates that he can catch and murmur forth a fragment of what is being stated within… It is in the third part that occurs the so-called voice ‘quaqua’, its interiorisation and murmuring forth when the panting stops. That is to say the ‘I’ is from the outset in the third part and the first and second, though stated as heard in the present, already over.’
The title How It Is, is a translation of the original French, Comment C’est, a play on words meaning to begin. So what is the character actually beginning? Could it be a new way of being?
A contemporary version of the man crawling through self-imposed mud to finally emerge liberated, is the Guy Ritchie movie Revolver. The main character, Jason Green, finds himself committing to a journey that requires a heavy dose of faith only to be faced with the ultimate challenge of confronting his worst enemy in his most feared environment (a lift), his worst enemy being his very own ego. The lift, a perfect metaphor for spiritual elevation, cuts out in between floors, and Green is forced to face himself in total darkness. This is his purgatory, in which Green battles with personal demons, to emerge without fear, purified, with inner-strength to sink battle-ships.
Beckett’s I that is already over would appear to be the process of dismantling the ego in order to begin again in a new way, free from the mind-induced sufferings that plague us, most commonly rooted in fear. The problem is that not many of us are prepared to consciously confront our fears, and so life has a way of organising itself to make sure that we do. If it were without purpose, then we may be justified in our sense of victimhood, however, that would be to miss the entire point of life, the great transformer.
How else does one expand emotionally and spiritually, other than to live out our experiences?
The most crippling of all is the fear of fear itself, the fear of living.
How many of us have lived in dread of a certain something, only to discover peace on the other side? How much time and energy do we waste worrying ourselves into an early grave? And can you imagine the possibilities if we were to drop our fears, by facing them head on, until they fall away like ash? Who could we be then?
Ceremonial darkness is an ancient shamanic tool for stalking the self, still being practised all over the world today, as a way of learning to see in the dark with our spirit self, rather than our often misguided senses, so that we may navigate through life from a position of self-knowing, and therefore truth. Darkness, for the Ancient Egyptians, was the The Hidden Place known as Amenta, a land between the earth and the heavens, whereby purification of the Self would be thorough and ruthless. This is a symbolic journey of transformation where the Self dies to the earthly world and is reborn conscious of its spiritual reality, ascending from the darkness, a creative spirit freed from the bondage of illusion.

The darkness, or void conjures in us the fear of the unknown, and as Balka states, it makes us wonder whether to move ahead at all. Why bother moving forward, I’m absolutely dandy where I am, right?
We can choose to stand still, but for how long? Over how many lifetimes? And at what cost too ourselves? Consider the effect of a dam on the river’s flow, where’s the freedom in that?
So here we stand, at the mouth of the void, in a year where dismantling the status quo seems to be the order of the day, how shall we move forward?
Be your own light in the darkness. Know that life springs eternal from the great void, there are new opportunities for us that we can’t quite make out from our current vantage point. Our approach is all important, we can either stand rooted to the spot in abject fear of the unknown, or we can choose to put our best foot forward with courage, in the knowledge that whatever we encounter, we will emerge a stronger, wiser, more spiritually-adjusted individual that knows no fear. Now that’s liberation.
V
∞
Ψ
otherwise, frankly, would would be the point?
If it’s a definition we need, we’d hit Wiki, right? So let’s cut out the foreplay.
I’m always fascinated to meet and read about talented people who have been submerged in a world of creativity from the beginning, it makes for great conversation. I was privileged to meet one such individual, the gifted sculptor Ros Newman, who was raised around art royalty, the likes of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth & Ben Nicholson. I have to admit, I was pretty star-struck with Ros’s recollections, which she found highly amusing.
My roots by modern standards are modest, being of first generation Serbian stock, family life was more about survival than creativity, we we’re pretty low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I’ve been painting and drawing from a very early age, but earnest exposure to art started at university where I began exploring dada and surrealism. Revelation came when I first made eye contact with a Mark Rothko painting, I remember thinking to myself, are people really allowed to paint like that? Which instantly translated to Shit, I should be painting like that! I had no idea how, but I knew from that moment that I would. Rothko was very aware of his paintings potential to provoke religious experience in the observer, and it certainly did in me. And not just as a result of his extraordinary painting, but by Rothko’s ability to convey the spiritual in his work; every painting is another piece from his soul, he understood both intuitively and intellectually that personal growth was about process. I was overwhelmed.
I find painting from observable reality very dull, and still do, it’s just not my bag. And yet I have always been fascinated with creating on a blank canvas. Looking back on some of my much earlier attempts as a teen, I now realise that the urge to abstraction was always there, but didn’t know how to express itself with any meaning. Rothko was my first teacher and I’m still distance-learning. The Late Series exhibition at Tate Modern was an emotional and spiritual experience, it was like walking around a true church, of the soul.
Abstraction is like great sex and the purest love all rolled into one; it just hits the spot. A language of and for the soul, abstraction is a collection of symbols, movements and moments like hammers hitting piano strings, to paraphrase Kandinsky. A great abstract work doesn’t look like anything, and so we automatically look inward for points of reference. I’ve noticed that when viewing art created by others, it either works for me or it doesn’t. Why is that? It’s as if a hand shoots out from the image, reaches into my gut, grabs it really hard and refuses to let go. Thank you and goodnight, it’s like love at first site, a good vibration.
Ultimately all matter is vibration; light hits the retina and the brain attempts to make sense of it, when in fact the light is already speaking to the heart, which then translates for the soul. The language of abstraction is the language of light, it’s kundalini energy charged, erotically esoteric and esoterically erotic. And so the artistic process is synonymous with the journey to enlightenment.
Painting abstract is having sex with God, while the painting itself is proof that I did.
V
∞
Duality
Mists of confusion crowd about
Not what I seem
or desire to be
Hurt and frustration play a tune
Anger creeps
from a darkened place
Slow stagnation not the way
Recognition brutal,
awake and raw
Light dispels illusion,
lead the way
Landscapes unfold in joyous form
Tears from my soul easing pain
Joy in truth,
a noble cause
Peace to sleep seems to touch.
Abner
Ψ
∞
Editor: while reading Abner’s poem Duality for the first time, it reminded me of this 2008 painting, pictured above. The painting’s title, The Patience of Crumpled Time (We Voyage Through), is borrowed from Pablo Neruda’s poem Furies and Sufferings. Neruda likewise borrowed the title for his poem from a line of Francisco De Quevedo’s poetry;
‘…There are in my heart furies and sufferings…’
In his poem Duality, it strikes me that Abner’s sensibility mirror’s something of Quevedo’s line of poetry. Of course, with art, we cannot help but project our own emotions while attempting to make sense of someone else’s… and perhaps this is yet another form of duality expressing itself, in contrast to allowing the event to just be for its own sake?
When reading any poetry, I aim to grasp a sense of the whole meaning, and yet what ultimately captures my imagination are isolated words, phrases and sentences that evoke a strong mental picture in my mind, like a string of pearls. These sensory impressions may only be strung very loosely, or even be completely unrelated to the original meaning or intent of the whole. No matter, for the point is to be inspired enough to dream, and so enough to act upon the dream.
Therefore, inspired by Abner’s poem Duality, and the original inspiration behind The Patience Of Crumpled Time…, I revisit Neruda’s Furies and Sufferings to create a collage of impressions. This collage, titled Heart Furies, is an abstraction of the original Neruda poem, posted in the category Concrete Poetry.
Art: The Patience of Crumpled Time is available as a giclée print on stretch canvas or sustainable archive-quality paper. Click on the image to purchase, or to view the VA gallery.
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Jutro which translates from Serbian as Morning, was painted back in 2004, a work that I still enjoy looking at because it refuses to date. One evening, in 2007, while prepping my entry for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, I had space for a third entry (at a time when we were allowed three rather than two entries). I selected Jutro kind of by accident, after a couple glasses of wine (a self-confessed light-weight)! It was only after I had completed the entry forms that I realised I had intended to select a different piece. Ironically, Jutro was shortlisted… a first! Just goes to show what happens when the mind moves out of the way of the decision-making process…wine-induced or otherwise.
V
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Editor’s note: Jutro is available as a giclée print on paper or stretch canvas by clicking on the image. Or check out the Print gallery, go to the home page main menu.
Poppy
I write, erase, rewrite
erase again, and then
a poppy blooms
Φ
kaite mitari
keshitari hate wa
keshi no hana
Hokushi 1718
Ψ
Editor’s note: the flower, in Japanese poetry, symbolizes human life. Keshi translates as both poppy and erase; and so the erasing of a flower is metaphorical for the transitory nature of human existence.
ART: this poignant Japanese haiku inspired the Op-Art work on canvas Poppy. To view in full, visit the VA Art & Print galleries by clicking on the image. Giclée prints available on stretch canvas & paper.
I must be one of the last human beings in the West to finally have their own blog, the Vesna Abstract Blog, re-named from here on in… VLOG ! This may prove to be a slightly bumpy ride, until I get the hang of this new bit of kit. But seriously, dialogue with all of you that have a view about Abstract Art, and more specifically, the Metaphysical, Spiritual, Esoteric, Intuitive and Healing aspects of art, is what its all about. It feels kind of niche right now, and I’m thinking that it’s time for the Intuitive Way to go mainstream. Art has been in the orthodox closet long enough, it’s time to come out with heresy, and paint it like it is!
Love & Light
V ∞