Aagya
आज्ञा
Permission
(Sourdough & Vindaloo No 21)
12" x 12"
Acrylic on Canvas
Aagya is permission, command, instruction. I began this piece after sunset on January 6, 2021. January 6 was an intense day for the planet, I think. For those of us who live on the ground in Washington DC, January 6 challenged our sense of survival.
I began this piece as a way to process my own emotions. I found myself painting after a day of responding to crises. Free hand drawing silver ellipses on the canvas as a way to calm nervous energy. My hands seemed to be making a very literal effort to find a silver lining.
We were all focused on our sense of security, our sense of personal power.
When our root Muladhara (मूलधारा) chakra is balanced, we feel safe, secure, confident in our ability to withstand challenges. I thought about friends and colleagues and fellow citizens at the Capitol, how threatened they felt, the instability, the chaos. In the moment, Washington DC did what it always does in a crisis. We went on auto-pilot, making sure family, friends, our community was safe. As the dawn broke the next day and I finally got my child to sleep, I found myself thinking about our Svadhisthana (स्वाधिष्ठान) chakra, which helps us relate to our emotions and the emotions of others. I was swallowed by how isolated and unsupported I felt by own extended family. As time goes by, I think a lot about what gets a person, a mother, a father, a tax-paying citizen with no criminal background to storm a federal building. The nerve. The pain.
The foggy shades of gray (sometimes matte, sometimes iridescent), the organic silver ellipses, (the desire to connect, to move), the texture and movement of the oranges and reds of the Muladhara and Svadhisthana (the desire to move past, to gloss over, to drown out the uncertainty of where we are) it’s all there. All kinetic. All shifting as we cope.