The Eye With Which The Gaze Pursues Itself

By observing nature, its processes, and the emotions it arouses within one’s self, man learns to observe himself.

I returned home last night after a short getaway to the mountains. Just as I entered the courtyard, in the semi-darkness outside, I was greeted by the scribbled and crowded buds of a rose bent to the ground by the weight of the snow. They could only be a mystery that I could not comprehend in all its complexity, because they seemed to tell me about the dependence on sensations and states from the ‘tree’ of any life that intersects with mine.

And there was something so sad about their appearance, a chill of the soul conceived in the image and likeness of the man who looked at them, carrying a kind of intense antipathy to the incredibly gray sky. They looked as if they were the realistic reflection in the mirror of my inner life, intersected with the life of the painter who knows nothing but admiration for the height of expression, but overlooks those abstract entities whose senses can be ignited.

And there was something else that turned my gaze to them, I don’t know what sense of appreciation that inevitably links art to the concept of responsibility. For a moment, I tried to overcome the artist’s protective attitude towards his own creation, to revise my strict attitude towards a reason for doubt, without renouncing the exacerbated attributes of the self that wanted to overlook a rarity, a whim of nature. As a result, I got a personification of nature in a being that got stuck in tears and colorless smiles…

Can your feelings become forms of self-expression, through experiences of spiritual fusion aimed at expressing a caring attitude toward the symbols of nature?

Rose buds never think of what a painting has to say, but they don’t seem to shudder at the feeling of my heart trembling in the face of an atmosphere saturated with worldly, egotistical, and selfish attributes. They are overwhelmed by the weight of the snow, feeling defeated, hurt, forgotten, overwhelmed by contradictory feelings in which the ugliness of their unpleasant appearance, hard to capture in words, plays a key role in defining forms of expression of emotions, such as sadness, fear, anger, grief, anxiety, despair, or irritability.

Therefore, the emotions extracted from a desolate, touching, pathetic appearance, which show a certain interconnection between “sfumato” and “chiaroscuro”, between the layer of reality and that of the memory of piety and prayer, evoked by symbols, can become forms of self-expression. Observing nature, the emotions it wears in the moods of the rose, suspended at the border between white and gray, the artist manages to create hyper-realistic portraits, so honest and emotional, immobilized in the space of themes such as “My Values”.

The rose is the symbol of my inner transformation, it is the symbol of the creators of new worlds, it is the symbol of an assumption of nature of the species interioritatis.

“The ugliness of their appearance will revive the form of an impossible separation from myself”, the artist says to himself when no emotion runs through his heart, or when no experience of God’s presence crosses the threshold of his existence. But at a glance at my appearance, you may think that I am a Christian, with all my appearance that defies any sociological construct, any attempt to fit patterns, any rule of time.

In fact, this means marking a symbol with strong emotions: “To admire your soul in sorrow, as if you were catching a desert rose in the middle of an oasis that, in fact, does not exist.”

Can your creation reveal that sentimental emotional memory that held back and captured everything that ever happened in an essential resemblance to the soul of nature?

The rose. Looking at it, just looking at it, you are amazed by the unspeakable simplicity of the composition, enjoying especially the passion that breathes from all that monumental canvas on which the painting will be rendered, giving way to another lasting aesthetic expression. Thus begins a new creative stage in the life of a great artist. With the gaze…

Honorably, faithfully, I realized that between the artist and the rose, between me and the model of a figure laden with gravity and sadness (and in which signs of suffering can be discerned), there is only one resemblance: we see each other, but we do not shine.

Somehow, my gaze turns to the specifics of the sensation of depth, by juxtaposing the spots of color and using cold and warm colors. In this case, the rose provides inspiration to one of the concrete ways of relating between the creator and the man endowed with the quality of being a speaker, through an Asterversindo, the great force of simplicity by which the degree of expressiveness of the image painted with a combination of white-gray associates the act of reflecting humanistic ideals.

The moment I look at it intently, with admiration, with warm eyes, in the immensity of the creative absolute, I say that this rose has given me a real life lesson: that you never know yourself better than when you are put down.

The rose is completely different from itself, from the one that was once so familiar to me. A kind of rare shyness, unusual in its nature, seems to control itself, feeling as if overwhelmed by a presentiment whose motive, as yet, I cannot discern. And it tells me with that rare, hidden, silent look you meet at any painter who has forgotten his true center of the eternal being: “Sadness is the expression of the purest sincerity that has ever adorned the soul of a Christian.”

The great work of Creation aims at the spiritual fusion of the human being with the incarnation of a soul of nature. It unites with leadership when the artist experiences the feelings of a self-discovery in an image whose symbol can be translated as: wisdom and understanding.

The Eye With Which The Gaze Pursues Itself ensures the passage of deep emotions along an image that tries through the sensitive to penetrate the intelligible. For example, the expression of sight that is manifested by the tears of the eyes, refers to that act of educating sensitivity – authentically transposed into an artistic construction that depicts the most hidden part of the life of the human spirit included in the higher, divine plan.