Why Krishna always wears yellow?

Artists can color the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or peo­ple might think we’re stu­pid.
– Jules Feif­fer, Pulitzer Prize win­ning car­toon­ist and author

In a world where archi­tec­ture, fine art, design and visual expres­sion pave main avenues of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, who can say an artist from a drafts­man? It’s nearly impos­si­ble unless you’re an artist your­self and under­stand well what it takes to cre­ate art.

Art is a facil­ity or a state of being best expressed through a feel­ing. From a feel­ing it steps down, enters ratio­nal­i­sa­tion process, artic­u­lates itself through the human set of ideas, sym­bols, thoughts, lan­guage and words. Then it bounces itself back up, through the feed­back loop con­sisted of numer­ous reflec­tions of itself in the world around, rises embell­ished and rede­fined through some new words, lan­guage and new ratio­nal­i­sa­tion into the now enriched realm of feel­ings and aes­thetic elation.

Good art thus con­tin­u­ously recre­ates itself. If it fails to do so, say (a) if it seems it con­stantly chases its own tail thus fuel­ing itself only through itself, (b) if it’s obvi­ously stuck in time, © hope­lessly cap­tured inside some layer of our per­cep­tion and under­stand­ing, (d) if it lacks new ideas and expres­sions and (e) not redis­cov­er­ing itself, then it ceases to be rel­e­vant. To live, it must be set free.

Art is thus inevitably con­nected with peo­ple in an ever-changing world. If peo­ple and their ideas seem to be frozen in time, so shall their art, its sym­bols, expres­sion and language.

When he who hears does not know what he who speaks means, and when he who speaks does not know what he him­self means, that is phi­los­o­phy.
– Voltaire (François-Marie Aronet)

Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnasm has its roots in devo­tional tra­di­tion of Gaudiya Vaish­nav­ism. Although endowed with a cul­tur­ally rich palette, devo­tional art of Gaudiya Vais­nav­ism has almost always been a ser­vant maid of its philo­soph­i­cal oeu­vre and a wider preach­ing mis­sion, which (para­dox­i­cally) was derived from the artis­tic and aes­thetic endeav­ours of the orig­i­nal authors of the scrip­ture, poetry and play that ignited spir­i­tual movement.

Namely, the phi­los­o­phy was a sec­ondary result of an artis­tic and emo­tion­ally remark­ably expres­sive vision of real­ity and its pos­si­bil­i­ties, our means to com­pre­hend it, embrace and par­tic­i­pate in it. But in time such art has become a slave unto its byprod­uct, or a mere lit­eral visual and oral trans­la­tor of the phi­los­o­phy and its idioms that (as a result) don’t change or move for­ward. A cre­ative con­nec­tion with the orig­i­nal art that enabled phi­los­o­phy to be mod­eled was for­ever gone.

Why that hap­pened, one may ask? Mainly because orig­i­nal poets and artists, or peo­ple of spirit and astound­ing vision, were gone and a result­ing phi­los­o­phy — a more ratio­nal expres­sion of an artis­tic feel­ing in its quest for mean­ing and ful­fill­ment — was left to preach­ers and mis­sion­ar­ies in their quests of evan­ge­li­sa­tion of all oth­ers who don’t share same philo­soph­i­cal (and cul­tural) views. They then asked new artists to visu­ally or orally trans­late the images of the sec­ondary indus­try of the same orig­i­nal art and its fab­u­lous expression.

Thereby newly highly praised artis­tic expres­sion is a mere lit­eral descrip­tion of the scrip­ture, allow­ing new artists lit­tle to zero of new feel­ings and nov­elty in aes­thetic delight.  This in so many ways reminds us of a fate of West­ern art dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages. Poten­tial new artists became super­vised and rigidly guided the­matic illus­tra­tors, turned into mere drafts­men serv­ing the priestly hier­ar­chy and evan­ge­lis­tic, holy goals. New artists thus became illus­tra­tors of the metaphors, or illus­tra­tors of some­thing that was already a superb illustration.

Devoid of orig­i­nal artis­tic and aes­thetic impulse, preach­ers and their phi­los­o­phy were stuck in time, and so was their vision of real­ity and the world around them. Not only the expres­sion was frozen in one layer of under­stand­ing and lim­ited to colours and shapes of only one cul­tural and social palette, but it is still con­stantly feed­ing on itself, never reflect­ing in the world around, never recre­at­ing itself or find­ing novel ways of expres­sion. It no longer dis­cov­ers new metaphors.

In the ratio­nal­i­sa­tion process our finest feel­ings and spir­i­tual rap­ture often lack ade­quate vocab­u­lary — both oral and visual — and, as Voltaire fun­nily remarks, that’s where phi­los­o­phy emerges. But ratio­nal­i­sa­tion is nec­es­sary because it cre­ates a ever new lan­guage, a vocab­u­lary of expe­ri­ence. A peren­nial philo­soph­i­cal task is thus to con­tinue the explo­ration of uni­ver­sal truth as dili­gently as pos­si­ble, which also means that its lan­guage and scope must probe real­ity and its pos­si­bil­i­ties, con­stantly chal­lenge our per­spec­tives. As noted above, that’s a pos­i­tive, ratio­nal feed­back from below that will stim­u­late new aes­thetic and vision­ary delights in artists’ hearts and reveal us new cap­ti­vat­ing realms, new mod­u­la­tions of being that are not only ratio­nal, but emo­tional and transrational.

God-dess Radha-Krishna is ratio­nal — i.e. we are able to con­tem­plate about her-his exis­tence and for­mu­late philo­soph­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal ideas — but we feel even more so God-dess is emo­tional and tran­sra­tional (or, its is full of unre­alised, uncon­cre­tised poten­tial). As long as our expe­ri­ence of God-dess encom­passes all scopes of our com­pre­hen­sion and per­cep­tion — both ratio­nal and tran­sra­tional — our exis­tence will become more mean­ing­ful, more com­plete and our lives more satisfying.

So is the sky blue or it can be red too? Chal­leng­ing com­mon wis­dom is a pri­mary task of any good artist in par­tic­u­lar, but inside of every one us is one artist hid­den, a soul will­ing to embrace change, dethrone old vision and rules of yesteryear.

The idea behind the Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism is to awake new artis­tic and aes­thetic rap­ture, re-interpret and re-boot the phi­los­o­phy using rich new palettes of con­tem­po­rary lan­guage and metaphors, enable new gen­er­a­tions of artists cre­ative free­dom to build on old rev­e­la­tion and reach the new heights of divine experience.

– Zvon­imir Tosic

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 10:02 and is filed under Cursum perficio and tagged with devotional art, Krishna, myth, yellow dress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.