Swami Vivekananda's Only Hope: Overcoming Monet

After In Search of Halal Painting comes the artist's next aesthetic adventure ....

Four years before his death, Swami Vivekananda (allegedly, according to some skeptics) wrote a letter to his Muslim disciple “Mohammedananda” in which he (in?)famously declared: “For our own motherland a junction of the two great systems, Hinduism and Islam — Vedanta brain and Islam body — is the only hope. I see in my mind’s eye the future perfect India rising out of this chaos and strife, glorious and invincible, with Vedanta brain and Islam body.”

Vedanta, the Hindu philosophical school of nondualism, implores its practitioners to understand all things as essentially non-different yet infinitely-manifested expressions of GOD. In this school, the various differentiated forms of the world – be it a lily, a person, or even a thought or religion – are recognized as illusory maya. While Swami Vivekananda calls it “the last word of religion and thought and the only position from which one can look upon all religions and sects with love,” and also describes it as “the religion of the future enlightened humanity,” he nonetheless writes that “practical Advaitism, which looks upon and behaves to all mankind as one’s own soul, was never developed among the Hindus universally. On the other hand, my experience is that if ever any religion approached to this equality in an appreciable manner, it is Islam and Islam alone. Therefore I am firmly persuaded that without the help of practical Islam, theories of Vedantism, however fine and wonderful they may be, are entirely valueless to the vast mass of mankind.”

Vedanta philosophy finds an easy parallel in the pure painting of Claude Monet, the French Impressionist whom Paul Cézanne described as "only an eye—but my God, what an eye!" Forms dissolve in Monet’s pure painting practice, which reached a zenith in his lily pond paintings where flowers morph into leaves and water, and reflections dissolve and reverberate against and between one another. Famously bewildering their viewers into a helpless and speechless stupor, these paintings are intense planes of pure colorings which culminate into the expression of a single consciousness, a world where all things lose their individuality and dissolve into a grand univocal oneness. 

It is for this sensationalism that Monet has been both lauded and derided as “only an eye.” In an effort to inscribe transcendental thought – and with it, specificity and meaning – into the realm of pure painting, this series of work embraces diverse and layered painting techniques as well as Islamic aesthetic principles to explore solutions to the paralyzing problems Monet (and postmodernism) has left us with, aspiring for a disciplined harmony of our eyes, minds, hearts, and bodies. Lilies are elevated to lotuses and framed with arches with one ideal (impossible?) goal: a non-stupefying yet nonetheless-symphonic - a clarifying rather than a confusing - Oneness. What we are left with, in all practicality, are partial objects with transcendental outlines: Platonic glitches all the way down … gaps waiting to be filled with your Love.

High res images available here.