Kundalini Awakening Being is an oil painting I made upon arrival to New York after a 5 month trip to Southeast Asia.

​

This painting is an example of combining figurative rendering with abstract painting. When I say abstract, I mean, there are elements of the painting that the viewer can't pinpoint what it is, other than it being color.

​

I am inspired by what I've read to be referred to as the "chakra" systems, in which there are 7 centers that are placed along the spine of the human being, and these 7 colors are in order of the color spectrum (i.e red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and ending in white).

​

My knowledge of the chakras, although I've studied them, and I think about them throughout my daily travels and adventures, I find myself to be limited in. 

​

I have personal association with each chakra, and I have a brief understanding of the chakra systems according to teachers that I have read from, and yet there still feels to be a vast under-appreciation and low acknowledgement of the totality of knowledge that has been communicated about the chakras.

​

I start to use my imagination to fill in the blanks about what the purpose and the functionality of the chakras are, and similar to how I understand other aspects of life, I will study this area of subject through painting and through visualizing it.

​

I have quite a few paintings that have explored the subject of chakras, and it is a subject I continue to find myself drawn back to because of the under appreciation of the society I have been raised in- which is a background of Catholicism, and science. 

​

In studying a culture of Indian mysticism, which is where this exploration has been ignited, I have lumped all things that are "Western" together in opposition to them.

​

There is an innate rebellion to studying chakras because we were not given an emphasis on the chakras in school growing up in New York.

​

In an effort to individuate myself from the background I grew up in, I think I have gravitated towards chakras and other subjects that have to do with anything atypical of American or Western commercial society.

​

This painting is a relic, or an artifact from the exploration of rebellious subjects.