Life Is Art Is Life
Untitled, watercolour, ink, alcohol on paper by Rami Schandall, ©2020.
At the beginning of 2020, besides turning the year with a study of the yamas and niyamas, I chose a word to be my focal aspiration for the year. (Much more helpful than a resolution!) My word was “concordance,” which is to bring all parts together in harmony.
I thrive at the intersection of many different ways of understanding. I study and work across disciplines, genres, philosophies, art forms. I embrace this multiplicity — and yet, again and again, I separate and silo aspects of myself. As if in isolation they would be made more authentic, or credible, or real — to whom? To be “multi-” is more nuanced, more complex, harder to name or explain or stereotype, harder to fit to form.
But the truth is: I am always one, not separate.
As a student of yoga and buddhist philosophy, I also understand that we are “multi-” and not separate, you and I and all. We are not separate from each other, nor from “the world.” We are still talking about sat, here, in a roundabout way — the essence of reality, the harmony of all parts; and satya – not-hiding, not-lying, non-illusion.
Yoga and meditation help me to listen in, to draw toward essence. In art practice, I sense in, drawn toward essence also — to translate into form, language, colour, or sound. With all my intention I make this effort, yet it is also outside my control. So I keep coming back to the space where truth can show up — all the richness of yoga and art and life — and I am forever surprised by the experience.
In a pragmatic sense, I have been diligently returning to “concord” all year, as I choose how to be visible in the world. This week, I hit a milestone that feels like a big deal: for the first time in over a decade, I have made artwork available for sale, with an art gallery on my website, and, soon, to be represented more broadly by a local artists' collective.
The first series, Body Language: Developing a Visual Language of Sensation, is an experiment in directly translating interoception (self-awareness of sensation) into colour and form, driven by curiosity and the idea of concord. I'd love for you to take a look!
