Breaking Joy— Coming to Principle Gallery, June Show 2023
The drum of the realization of the promise is beating, we are sweeping the road to the sky. Your joy is here today, what remains for tomorrow?
The armies of the day have chased the army of the night,
Heaven and earth are filled with purity and light.
Oh! joy for he who has escaped from this world of perfumes and colour!
For beyond these colours and these perfumes, these are other colours in the heart and the soul.
Oh! joy for this soul and this heart who have escaped the earth of water and clay,
Although this water and this clay contain the hearth of the philosophical stone.
— The Drum of the Realization, Rumi
The new painting at the top is part of my upcoming solo show, Passages, at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA. The show opens on Friday, June 9th. This piece is titled Breaking Joy and is 24″ by 18″ on canvas.
I think the opening lines of the poem above from Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, describe very well what I see in this painting:
Sweeping the road to the sky… your joy is here today…the armies of the day have chased away the army of the night…Heaven and earth are filled with purity and light…
That’s the kind of joy I saw in this painting when I first finished it which gave me its title. It’s the idea of finding one’s joy in rising above the earthly bonds of traits such as desire and envy and finding it in light and nature and in the world of thought and imagination.
Not an easy thing to do, of course. But this serves as a reminder that this is not simply a goal that we might hopefully attain in some future time or distant place. Joy is always near at hand, always breaking with each new day.
Joy is in the here and now.
Here’s a lovely version of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from German pianist Igor Levit. A fine way to start the week.
Redtree Times 
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