Sri Chinmoy 1931-2007: the man who painted Eternity

Sri Chinmoy was an artist of great mystical depth, but he was also a musician, poet, author, composer, playwright and athlete, each of which he pursued with the same enthusiasm, dynamism, determination and vision. Perhaps the one feature of Sri Chinmoy's output across so many creative and athletic fields had in common was the manner in which the creation spontaneously and intuitively poured out of its creator; nowhere more was this demonstrably visible than in his art. In contrast to the traditional notion of an artist cloistered away in his studio waiting for inspiration to come, Sri Chinmoy just sat down, often in full view of crowds of people, and just starts painting. What the end result was going to be, not even Sri Chinmoy knew: for this artist, the vision and its implementation happened at the same time. "The whole picture does not come to me at once.", he explained. "As I start painting, I see a streak of light right ahead of me and devotedly I try to follow that streak of light. But on some rare occasions the light is so powerful that I envision the painting long before I have actually touched the paper, I don’t bring it forth; it comes to the fore from within, In the light the colour is there. Each time I see the streak of light, I see the colour.”

Sri Chinmoy began his painting odyssey in 1974, with a simple drawing of a rose in an Ottawa hotel room. His drawing style quickly evolved as the inner vision guiding his art took wings, and he began producing large numbers of acrylic paintings, bold creations of colour often created in a matter of minutes, abstract to the outer eye but revealing great mystical depth when viewed with the inner eye of the heart. In the year 1975 alone, over 200,000 of these paintings were created; 16,031 of them in a single 24-hour period of that year. Sri Chinmoy would paint at such a rate that his students had to build special drying machines to dry the paint on the newly-finished pictures; they had no space to put all the drying pictures otherwise! Other artists might spend infinitely more time musing on how to obtain the finished creation than actually painting it; Sri Chinmoy was just content to go with his heart's feeling and move immediately onto the next creation waiting to take shape.

In 1991, he began a new phase of his artistic odyssey with his drawings of 'soul-birds' - as the name suggests, they represent aspects of the human soul in the form of a bird. “For me, birds have a very special significance on a spiritual level.”, he once said of his birds. “They fly in the sky, and the sky is all freedom. So when the birds fly in the sky, they remind me of the soul’s infinite freedom. I feel that if people come here to view these birds, their inner hunger to fly in the sky of infinite freedom will be fed.” In everything that he did, Sri Chinmoy always placed the soul's reality above the transient comings and goings of everyday life. His body may have departed this mortal coil, but his immortal spirit shines on through his creations, flying like his soul-birds in the heart-sky of infinity.