Virgo represents the “womb of time” wherein the spiritual seeker is slowly matured through profound crises. He needs to grow into the light of knowledge and learn to use his free will in a responsible way. When nature considers him mature she leaves him to himself for further evolution to higher consciousness. Our earth is also in a slow process of ripening in the womb of the Mother Nature.

Virgo stands for the virgin nature of the Divine Mother. She is depicted with an ear of corn in one hand and a light in the other. They symbolise the spiritual food for the souls and the spiritual light which lightens the way.

For the illustration of the Virgin I reworked a photo (by Sailko, Wikimedia) of a statue of Hera, the Greek queen of the gods. In her womb I placed a human silhouette on the globe surrounded by a field of light. The goddess is walking on a forest path. In her right hand she carries two ears of corn and in her left hand she carries a flame lighting the way. The ears are pointing to the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, the mothers of the seven aspects of form life. In esoteric astrology, this constellation is deeply linked to Virgo.

18 May 2018, pencils and photo work

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The different zodiacal signs are clustered in groups – you can see here all my Virgo paintings.

The video:

In meditation, the awareness is raised from the heart to the head, linking the personality to the soul and finally the soul to the super-soul. The head centre is the point of the highest illumination. A yogi meditates on the correspondences to higher centres: in relation to the planet, the head centre corresponds to Shamballa; in relation to the sun it corresponds to the cosmic sun. The other dimensions of the sun are the heart of the sun and the physical sun. With the planet, the corresponding other dimensions are the Spiritual Hierarchy and the humanity.

For this image, I used the picture of the head of a Buddha statue as the head of a yogi. I placed the symbol of sun at the Ajna centre, which is governed by the sun. I visualised the meditative ascent with a stair leading to a gateway of light (using elements of a photo by Till Krech, Wikimedia) in the form of a lingam symbolising Shamballa. I fused two images of the planet, depicting the Himalayas and beyond, Shamballa. They are shining through the head of the yogi. The crown of hair of the yogi is like a receptacle for the downpour of light. I created the flow with a picture of the physical sun (photo: Nasa), visualising the heart of the sun and the cosmic sun with other photos of the sun.

To represent THAT which cannot be portrayed – the inexpressible Oneness expressing into trinity and multiplicity – I positioned the three heads of a statue of Lord Dattatreya at the place of the spiritual sun, at the top, and surrounded them with an array of multi-coloured rays on a starry background.

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The different zodiacal signs are clustered in groups – you can see here all my Leo paintings.

The video:

The primordial light permeating creation is called the Mother of the World. The seers realized different stages of reflection of this light into the various states of creation. The reflection is called with different names at different planes but all are understood as expressions of the moon principle. The satellite of our Earth is just one dimension of this principle. Neptune is seen as a higher dimension, and on a supra-cosmic plane the principle is called Soma in the Eastern scriptures. The reflective principle functions in us as the mind, mirroring the light of the soul. The sixteen phases of the ascending and of the descending moon phases are called the sixteen syllabled name of the Divine Mother. They correspond to gradations of light and of consciousness.

For the illustration of the Divine Mother I reworked a Chinese painting of Quan Yin. The halo around her head is formed by merging an image of the Sun and of Neptune. She holds Neptune in her hands, lying in the crescent. From there, water, the vital energy, pours down to Earth. For the downpour I used a photo of the Staubbach Fall in the Bernese Alps. The bottom is created from a view over the lake of Geneva seen from an airplane. In the background of the Mother there is a dark blue moon representing the background of the cosmic moon principle. It is surrounded by the bright and the dark halves of the moon phases, where the lower sphere forms another crescent. Above the upper half you see a sphere of stars indicating the vast dimension of the Divine Mother.

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The different zodiacal signs are clustered in groups – you can see here all my Cancer paintings.

The video:

The point of the birth of objectivity from subjectivity is visualised as the gate of the temple linking the inner space with the outer space. It is symbolised by the glyph of Gemini ♊ or the Greek letter ‘Pi’, Π. Pi is the path from the circumference to the centre or the origin; it is called the path from visibility to invisibility. Pi stands for wisdom; the upper line of the symbol projects two vertical lines meaning that the duality emerges from the unity. Gemini is worshipped as the birth of the first Androgyne, the male-female God, the divine pair of Shiva and Shakti.

The centre of the image shows the gate of the temple formed by a duplication of the Greek letter Pi. The gate is standing on the periphery of the circle whose centre is the sun. The sun is located in the middle of the upper line of the symbol. The circle reflects again in the lower part of the image representing objectivity. On the surface of the water the light reflects like a path of light leading to the gate. In the inner of the gate there is a lingam of light, a symbol of the divine. From out of it comes forth the first pair.

See more pictures on the site with my paintings. If you want to print the image, you can download the file in medium and high resolution format.
The different zodiacal signs are clustered in groups – you can see here all my Gemini paintings.

The video:

2 February 2018, pencils and photo work

Two days ago, Sebastián, a friend from Buenos Aires, sent me the video he had done on the basis of my Taurus painting. (The last blogpost was about the creation of this image.)

The painting was inspired by the Taurus Full Moon seminar Sri Kumar held 20 years ago, 1998, on Mount Rigi, Switzerland. It was my third seminar and I was deeply impressed by it. These are some of Sri Kumar’s words from the seminar:

“Taurus is the bull. The bull is called Vrishabha in Sanskrit. Vrishabha also means the downpour of the energy of Will. The energy of Taurus is the bull. It is a bull of higher circles and the planet is the cow which is impregnated by the energies of the bull. This is an annual happening. The full moon of Taurus is an important event for the planet. The energy impregnates the earth and the beings on this earth. Therefore, Taurus full moon is known as the time where you can be impregnated by the Will.”
Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar, Taurus full moon 1998

The astrological sign of Taurus, a semi-circle above a circle, symbolises the moon through which the energies are received from higher circles and passed on to the earth. Taurus is called ‘Vrishabha’ in Sanskrit meaning the downpour of light. The star Aldebaran, which is called ‘Rohini’ in Vedic wisdom, is understood as the eye of the bull through which the energies are transmitted. When the sun passes through the constellation Rohini (between 11 and 24 degrees of Taurus), he is called the impregnating bull which impregnates the life on earth. It is also a spiritual impregnation which can give us a fresh dose of energy for acts of good will.

To illustrate this symbolism, I merged the image of the head of an Indian cow with the image of the crescent moon. I edited a photo of Aldebaran and placed it at the top as the sun from which a fiery drop comes down into the bowl formed by the horns of the cow. The earth indicated with a flower meadow shows the fullness of the freshly impregnated life.

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The different zodiacal signs are clustered in groups – you can see here all my Taurus paintings.

20 December 2017, pencils and photo work

The visible planets are the physical bodies of great conscious entities expressing themselves through these forms. Just as we have incarnated into our bodies to grow and to make experiences, these sublime beings also live in their planetary globes to undergo their evolution on a cosmic scale. All the stars in the sky are at various stages of evolution. There are planetary entities higher than our planet, and there are suns higher than our sun. Like a flower that grows and unfolds to bring forth seeds for future flowers, our planet also unfolds like a beautiful flower, preparing future stages of evolutionary growth.

I visualised the earth inside the petals of a huge flower. For this, I worked on a photo of a Brahma Kamala flower (Saussurea obvallata, transformed from a Wikimedia photo by Sujay25), making it glow like a lantern. I created the starry background with the help of the beautiful Stellarium software. The stars are like fireflies blinking in the darkness of a magical garden.

See more pictures on the site with my paintings. If you want to print the image, you can download the file in medium and high resolution format.
The different zodiacal signs are clustered in groups – you can see here all my Aries paintings.

Some days ago an Indian friend sent me a Facebook video by Mona Caron, an artist creating large-scale paintings on walls (murals). I have seen other kinds of murals but here I was touched by the subtlety of the colours and the playfulness with which she is creating mainly vegetative motives on all kinds of walls.

[In brackets: While looking at the videos of her paintings, my thoughts went back to the mid-70s, to my student times in Münster, Germany:
Together with two friends I lived on a farm, in an old milker lodging. There I could do a few murals, in my amateur style to bring in some poetic ambience: In the entry a big painting of a church window with flowers, in the kitchen a branch of a cherry tree with a poem of Hölderlin, in the sleeping room a big wall painted with gold patterns of water colour and in the long dark corridor a big spacy painting glowing in the dark with ultra-violet light… And I decorated the windows of the toilet at a little sideroom with glass painting…]

Mona Caron’s flowers grow on fronts of high-rise buildings, at crossroads or along the streets. Of course, when she is painting flowers, these are not “vertical gardens” bringing the beauty of live flowers but her murals enliven the ambience and stimulate the imagination. She is very creative in the way she brings beauty into the otherwise stony deserts of mega-cities. And her works now embellish walls all around the globe. See here the “Market Street Railway” mural. However, she does not only work outdoor but also does indoor artwork.

Mona Caron is a native of Ticino, in the Italian part of Switzerland. She is the daughter of Swiss theatre and opera set designer Peter Bissegger, and now is based in San Francisco. Besides painting she is also active in “art-ivism” with social movements to support different issues like climate justice events.

Read more about Mona Caron on her website.

Painting giant weeds on buildings all around the world: “Weeds”

Outgrowing: “Outgrowing our skyrocketing dangers, reaching for clear skies.. . Healing herbs for an ailing earth, in a 6500 square feet mural in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.”

Manifestation Station – a painted utility box

Picture from the video “Outgrowing” by Mona Caron (c)

There is a cyclical movement of time in creation. It is like the growth of a seed to a tree bringing forth new seeds. The wisdom teachings explain that there is no end to existence. When a physical form is dissolved, it does not end but continues to exist on subtler planes. With seven cosmic pulsations the creation descends and ascends again. From innermost realms, it comes down to objectivity; and after a while, the direction is changed and there is again an ascent via subtle and causal states to the absolute state. Our earth is part of a chain of seven globes. There are earths in preparation in three preceding states, we are on this present earth in the fourth state, and there are earths in recession in three succeeding states.

I illustrated this great pulsation with the circle of the serpent eating its tail, a symbol of the eternal movement of time. I created three semi-transparent globes on the descending arc and three globes on the ascending arc with a crescent of the present earth at the centre. I transformed a photo of the gears of an old pocket watch (Wikimedia, Sachin Sandhu) and placed it in a desert-like surrounding symbolising the slow movement of time. From its centre grows a Brahma Kamala flower (transformed from a Wikimedia photo by Schwiki), a mundane replica of a celestial flower growing at high altitudes in the Himalayas, symbolising the sublime unfoldment of nature.

See more pictures on the site with my paintings. If you want to print the image, you can download the file in medium and high resolution format.
The different zodiacal signs are clustered in groups – you can see here all my Pisces paintings.

19 November 2017, pencils and photo work

According to the Eastern wisdom teachings, the whole creation is brought forth through an impulse coming from the background of existence. It is described as a light emerging from the “Eye of Shiva”. At the end of one creation, all is again absorbed into this eye of Shiva, the lord of divine will until the next creation is brought forth.

The passage of emergence and mergence is called the point of Aquarius. In the human body, it corresponds to the higher third eye at the top of the forehead. When this “Eye of Shiva” is opened in us, it is like a lightning expressing the divine will and passing through the whole system. This eye can create and destroy; therefore, the knowledge about it cannot be given to the present humanity which is selfishly oriented.

To visualise the first impulse I fused images of ripples on a water surface, of a galaxy and of sunrises. I transformed a photo of a statue of Shiva (Wikimedia: Kachnar City, author Shivam S.) holding a trident with a drum and a mala, symbols of the vibration of sound and of the ether. The serpent around his neck represents the kundalini energy lifted up to the creative planes. From out of his third eye, the impulse of electric fire penetrates all planes of existence.

See more pictures on the site with my paintings. If you want to print the image, you can download the file in medium and high resolution format.
The different zodiacal signs are clustered in groups – you can see here all my Aquarius paintings.

17 October 2017, pencils and photo work