I don’t believe in a God (or Gods). I don’t believe in Hell, Purgatory or Heaven. I believe in physics, in the concept of eternal universes, in the perfection of our imperfect cosmos. I believe in the force of nature, a kind of intelligent living being, but without any sentiments or feelings. I was born into a Catholic family and up until the age of 8 I received a Catholic tutoring. Even so I didn’t believe in God consciously from the age of 12, but I am still fascinated by Catholic religion and especially by medieval art and culture. Medieval Art is one of my greatest passions. I can’t take my eyes off the marvellous, absolutely stunning Gothic Cathedrals, impressive gothic altarpieces, the beautiful icons, the fantastic gargoyles, and burlesque creatures, unorthodox and original creations all. Actually I love all the medieval visual art, the architecture and designs.

After this long interruption (I am an artist and as such I have to say something about me!) back to the big Trinity.

Pope John Paul II said: The essential characteristic of heaven, hell or purgatory is that they are states of being of a spirit (angel/demon) or human soul, rather than places, as commonly perceived and represented in human language.

This language of place is, according to John Paul II, inadequate to describe the realities involved, since it is tied to the temporal order in which this world and we ourselves exist. In this he is applying the philosophical categories used by the Church in her theology and saying what St. Thomas Aquinas said long before him.

Incorporeal things are not in place after a manner known and familiar to us, in which way we say that bodies are properly in place; but they are in place after a manner befitting spiritual substances, a manner that cannot be fully manifest to us. [St. Thomas Aquinas,Summa Theologiae, Supplement, Q69, a1, reply 1]

This is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes the truths of faith on this subject:

To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called hell (n. 1033).

How different are these views from the ideas of the medieval artists, sculptors, builders, decorators and craftsmen about Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.  They saw them as places. The medieval artists took delight in their subversive possibilities.

They created the most incredible churches, altarpieces, icons and paintings. Among those lots of them on the topic of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.

The Buddhist concept of heaven and hell is entirely different from that in other religions. Buddhists do not accept that these places are eternal. It is unreasonable to condemn a man to eternal hell for his human weakness but quite reasonable to give him every chance to develop himself. From the Buddhist point of view, those who go to hell can work themselves upward by making use of the merit that they had acquired previously. There are no locks on the gates of hell. Hell is a temporary place and there is no reason for those beings to suffer there forever.

The Buddha's Teaching shows us that there are heavens and hells not only beyond this world, but in this very world itself. Thus the Buddhist conception of heaven and hell is very reasonable. For instance, the Buddha once said,

'When the average ignorant person makes an assertion to the effect that there is a Hell (patala) under the ocean he is making a statement which is false and without basis. The word 'Hell' is a term for painful sensations.'

The idea of one particular ready-made place or a place created by god as heaven and hell is not acceptable to the Buddhist concept.
I like this concept of Buddhism and also very much the concept of the Toltecs. We are creating in a metaphorical sense our own hell, purgatory and heaven in this world in our own lives.

I was playing with this idea: heaven is Death, purgatory is our temporary existence, and our birth is Hell!

I am absolutely aware about the fact that my abstract vision about Hell, Purgatory and Heaven is nothing compare to the imaginary art of Hans Memling, Hieronymus Bosh, Christobal Rojas etc, etc. It is my first approach to this topic. Just trying the colours and the structure.  I used my own technique to create this modern triptych on 3 separate canvasses.

Here are they:

Hell, Purgatory and Heaven - triptych by Kasia B.T.

Here are the images of the final result:

The end result 2 October 2010

Ugly - final reslut

Beautiful final October 2010

The installation in the Garden of Lyalls Cottage

My conclusions:

Brown, yellow-brown and red colours predominate on the "ugly" side.

• Emphatic resistance to the colour red. The CD's in red on the side of "Beautiful" are only in combination with other colours.
• They are lots of CDs on the Ugly side that I personally like a lot.

And last, but perhaps the most important conclusion:

• De gustibus non est disputandum.

"In matters of taste there is no dispute" said the Romans a long time ago and they were right. Any opinion on the topics of taste is futile. Objectively and logically it can be concluded that there is no good or bad taste. You cannot say that someone is wrong or that someone is right only because he or she likes something different than you. What I like you don’t have to. One should not judge others just because they feel differently and/or think differently.
To recapitulate, in general humans are stupid if they surrender themselves to the pressure of public opinion, newspapers, magazines, fashion designers, critics, art critics and so on. The implication is that the media prey on our stupidity. But this is a different discussion and a subject for another long debate!

Thank you very much to all of you who took part in making this installation.

It will now be dismantled and moved to Poland where I will have a solo exhibition later this year. I will post about the Polish results after the close of the exhibition in Poland in December.

What are the inspirations for my new work?. Definitely the colours and the sounds of the garden of Lyalls Cottage and the fields and meadows around Dunchideock, of Devon; the animals in and around the garden; the hills behind the river Exe in the East and de shapes of Exmoor in the North, the shooting stars at the cloudless sky in the night and all the others inexpressible sensational impulses and invisible mystical creatures.

I am so happy to be here, Devon is a wonderful spot to live!

Here are the images of my new collages and installations. I will make a separate post about the sculptures.

collage canvas prints

Here are some photos after a couple of days.

TWO – THE ONE FOR ME

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know the good as the good only because there is the bad.

Therefore creating and not creating arise together;
Dark and light complement each other;
Large and small contrast each other;
Realistic and abstract follow one another;
Colour and structure harmonize each other.

Therefore the artist goes about feeling and seeing not judging
Creating not reproducing
The ten thousand artworks rise and fall without finish,
Making, yet not possessing,
Working, yet not taking credit.
Art is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.

Based on Two from Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tsu

As the winter-night falls over Devon by Kasia Turajczyk

Metropolis and its heart, acrylics on canvas; 90cm x 90cm

I have been thinking for a long time about what constitutes the heart of the big city. What could it be? The technology and the evolutionary progress and development in the education of homo sapiens? Or our nature, the fact that we are sociable, a social and collective animal? However this is inconsistent with the reality – people who live in a small village or town are more sociable and less anonymous than those who live in big molochs. Living in a big city makes us 100% nameless, more private and more secret.

Our planet, our Earth can exist without us, maybe better than with us. But what about the Metropolis? Metropolis is a human creation. Without homo sapiens there will be no Metropolis. After 100 years, maybe even less than that, the Metropolis will be trash, in ruins, a great source for fantasy art paintings and illustrations.

The Metropolis is such a big thing and the order within it is not constrained during its development to repeat the things that exist in one part in any other part. Even if we reflect that the big cities were made by and for people, some order exists in it without our knowledge. There is also a lot of order in the creation of Metropolis which we humans have put there, like a string in a maze, so that we shall not lose our way. However the living system that is Metropolis has its own order, but the brain is separated from the heart. This amazing, ill and degenerate body, also beautifully ruthless and always sleepless, can’t exist without us humans. Therefore the heart of the Metropolis is us – PEOPLE.

If you see the painting in the flesh you can spot lots of creatures inside the central part of the work, and also lots of small creatures all around the suburbs. We are the heart!

red paintings

I remember as a child, I had to attend Sunday masses. I didn’t like them; it was for me a kind of torment, literally and metaphorically.  Probably I was very afraid to be confronted again and again, by the fearful personifications of God presented by the clerics. I was terrified to be punished for all the sins that I hadn’t committed yet, but would in the future. There was no escape from that. Even the angels had a kind of apocalyptic dimension. When lying in bed, I often thought about my “personal” Angel. I had no doubt about the fact that somewhere an Angel was watching me. I had one big problem. I wasn’t sure if it was a good Angel or a bad one. Maybe it was a hellish one and not a holy one.  I had a picture of an angel hanging above my bed. He was beautiful, with blue eyes and white hair and a very, very distressing smile. And so it was that my Angel was gazing at me, as if he knew that one day I would betray him and leave him. When at the age of 12 I had rebelled and had declared  that “I don’t want to believe and I categorically deny any belief in such a cruel, evil, bad god  and I do not want to be frightened any more of hell, devils and original sin” I had terrible dreams for the first months afterwards. In my dreams I was somewhere close to the church. It was a big Gothic church, and it was always night. I was attacked by devils, they tore me, hurt me; wild winds had jerked me into the square in front of the church, darkness and a terrible fear occupied my dreams.  That was a horrible experience,  a nightmare, but even more it cemented my decision that God, who is haunting me,  punishing me, and scaring me, will not be my god.
And so it happened, that I became somehow atheist, somewhat Buddhist, a follower of my personal faith; all together my religion is a kind of eclecticism.

Since that time I have been trying to avoid that hell on earth, in my daily life, in my relationships with others, but also in my thoughts and feelings. Hell and Heaven, we create them for ourselves, here on this planet, in our lives, our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, hatreds, and in relationships.
Hell and Heaven are also created for us by nature, life, and the condition of being homo sapiens, something that is unavoidable; we can only accept it.

After this very long introduction it is time for introducing my new painting.

This is an installation composed of four panels, titled “Heaven Is In My Mind”. It belongs to the “My Brain” series.
There is a lot of blue, gold, purple, dark plum, grains of all sorts, and recycled stuff.
It is large: 80 cm x 80 cm.