First consoled by his Family of Saltimbanques then later turned on by his nudes, Picasso was my muse since childhood. I placed a photo of him in a gold leaf frame along with a frayed paintbrush and a squeezed out tube of Scarlet Lake and it hung on a sequence of studio walls over the years. His chin casually resting in his large square palm, I would look into his eyes searching for his thoughts on my painting in progress. Then suddenly I was done with Picasso, replacing him with The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca. I realized my paintings were devotional whether to flesh or spirit. A silence entered my space as I looked to the angels attending the scene.
The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca
While doing an online search for the occult significance of salt I was captivated by a black and white photo of Gandhi. I felt affection for Gandhi without knowing much about him. Years ago I was a month in Puducherry and each evening had strolled the promenade enjoying the sunset and saris rippling in the onshore breeze. Children loved to play at the feet of the striding larger-than-life Gandhi statue, his expression twinkling and steadfast. In the photo online he is bent over grasping the salt at his feet haloed by devotees who watch him with the rapt attention of the angels in Piero’s painting. I printed the photo and taped it on the wall next to The Baptism where I could observe this spiritual and artistic pairing.
A voice within me spoke, “You’re going to India in the fall.”
How that would transpire had not been revealed and I kept the pronouncement to myself. A divine seed had been planted in my heart. I would wait and see what would grow.
When I travel I can lose myself in a book a world away from my destination. In Mexico it was Jackson Pollock: An American Saga and in India I had wandered in Spain with Goya. I lay on the bed in my room by the shore of the Arabian Sea taking a break from the sunlight while reading of the Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s occupation in 1808. Goya commemorated these events in his paintings The Second and The Third of May. Outside on the beach I heard some excitement. I saw a pink freckled elephant gracefully swaying in the rhythm of India, massive and illusive, his ankle chains tinkling.
In early June I visit my native Montreal bringing with me The Essential Gandhi. “What I want to achieve – what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years – is self-realization, to see God face to face…” My own route is circular, an ouroboros of religion and art. I begin at Christ Church Cathedral, my grandfather’s parish as bishop of the diocese of Montreal during my childhood. Its foundation now a shopping mall several floors below, its backdrop a glass skyscraper housing a large audit, tax and advisory firm, it is nonetheless the beautiful stone neo-Gothic church wherein I was baptised and confirmed. As I enter, my dim childhood is articulated through light and form. I pause at the family pew where I had stroked the beaver collar on my mother’s winter coat while absorbing the beauty of art and music and poetry enclosed within the architecture. Next stop is the Montreal Museum of Fine Art where I had seen my future holding possibilities beyond the endless ennui. I read the body embodied in the paint and unconsciously began my quest for artistic transubstantiation. Lastly I make the ascent to The Cross on Mont-Royal. I look east and view Mont Saint-Hilaire, home for my first three years and my ancestral home on the artists’ tree: Ozias Leduc and Paul-Emile Borduas, painters of the sacred and secular.
550 steps
up the staircase to Mont-Royal
the sound of a heart*
There was a longing inside of me to be closer to Gandhi. Suddenly the door opens and I am touched with the answer. I will go to India in the fall. I will walk the Dandi Path, retracing Gandhi’s Salt March from the Sabarmati ashram to Dandi Beach. It must have been true as the plan fell into place in a day.
* “Art is the sound of a soul, the sound of a heart also.”
“L’art c’est le son d’une ame, le son d’un coeur aussi” - Ozias Leduc