Chapter 6

The supreme Art is to know the Supreme Artist intimately, within and without. This knowledge, well-established, cannot but guide all our movements on artistic lines. And this knowledge will be the basis of a perfectly beautiful life within and without. Art in the most effective sense of the term is a sublime truth that draws our soul from within towards the Infinite Vast.

            Sri Chinmoy

As a spiritual poet, Sri Chinmoy's poetry and indeed all his artistic creations spring from a profound experience of God. in God he finds the Source of beauty, delight and wisdom and as he drinks deeply of these qualities, so he moulds his existence that it may reflect them more fully He becomes an artist whose raw material is his own life, whose every song, brushstroke or word is borne on the wings of divine love and carries the message of oneness with the Infinite.

In this chapter I shall try to assemble Sri Chinmoy's expressions of his artistic purpose and show how he assimilated them into his artistic productions during the decade 1971-1981. Although the chapter will follow a broad chronological outline, the reader will find these ten years replete with such a wealth of artistic works that weeks or even days separate certain major undertakings so that they appear to merge as part of a single uninterrupted and immense act. In these ten years, Sri Chinmoy published close to 10,000 poems, painted over 135,000 paintings and composed some 3,000 songs in English and Bengali. It is a composite achievement of a scale which, I believe, is without parallel in our times and perhaps also in times past. It signifies a quest for perfection, an endless growth and expansion, that has led Sri Chinmoy into many and varied fields of artistic manifestation and impelled him to express himself abundantly within each one. [1]