Dance on the edge of time

CURIOUSLY, THIS WAS PAINTED in the weeks before a trip to South East Asia in which giant pink lotus blossoms, dancing storks and large dragonflies all suddenly became part of the everyday scenery, although these motifs had emerged in the mandala without any thought or awareness of their ubiquity in SE Asia at all.

 

The storks dance in a stately circle, slowly turning around the lotus flowers in the limpid waters of a pool beyond the reach of today’s human time, the world encapsulated in the decorations on an ancient oriental ceramic vase, unhurried, unspoiled and eternal. This is nature in its essential form, in balance with itself, undisturbed by the derangements unleashed upon the natural cycles and systems of the planet by frenetic human activity.

 

None of us can any longer hope to inhabit such spaces –in this dimension – but we can take in refreshment from such images of a timeless untroubled zone that still ultimately reflects a deeper truth about the nature of what is, even than a contemporary photograph from SE Asia, showing lotuses and storks dancing against a backdrop of industrial depradation.