Process Notes:
Rtam Vadishyami, 2023

Amee and I are longtime friends. Our relationship was forged through many joyful years of studying yoga together. When she approached me about a commission, her intent was very clear:

“I want a painting that embodies this home.”

Not a painting of her home — I’d be the wrong painter for that job. She wanted a painting that, in some way, could hold the essence of the place she’d spent years lovingly shaping into her nest.

An apparently simple request that ushers me into a fog of confusion and irreducible complexity on my way to a finished piece? Yeah, I’m the right painter for that.

We began with a walkthrough of her home. I recorded our conversation and photographed anything that caught my eye. Amee has many dimensions: an engineer, a world traveler, a seeker. She’s cultivated a home that is both an altar to the dance of her life and an inviting sanctuary for her beloveds to find comfort and rest.

It was a pleasure to wander through the space, casually chatting as I took photos that I felt spoke to resonant themes in our conversation. I took note of the reverence for geometry and structure, balanced with the softness of comfort. The many artifacts of her adventure through diverse worlds. Sculptures, maps, statues, paintings. Rich textures, deep greens and blues. I gathered anything that I thought might be helpful.

Amee had chosen a short wall connecting the living room and the kitchen as the future home of the painting. We experimented with some tape rectangles in order to arrive at the precise size that would suit the wall perfectly. 26 inches wide, 42 inches tall.

I built the wood panel to size and stretched canvas over it. We decided the deep green of an opposing wall would make a good field for the composition, so I mixed up a big batch and draped a watery coat of it across the canvas.

And then it was time for… time.

Lots of time.

The “work” during this phase is mostly unseen. Mulling. Doubting. Attempting to catch winds of inspiration with fast, loose sketches. Finding ways to appease the demons of perfection and impatience.

Once I decided to use the octagonal structure of her coffee table as a visual foundation, things began to flow. This painting involved a lot of puzzling: can this fragment of this pattern mesh with this figure? When should the geometry holding the surface together assert itself, and when should it recede into the background?

Slowly, forms articulated themselves. The key emergence that snapped things into alignment was the dancer, whose shape I found in a watercolor painting in Amee’s bedroom. Her posture helps weave disparate forms together and speaks to an essential spirit of Amee’s life path.

The name — Rtam Vadishyami — is a transliterated excerpt of one of my favorite Sanskrit mantras, one I chant most mornings. It is sometimes referred to as the Prana Shantipat, and it’s found in an ancient Hindu scripture called the Taittiriya Upanishad. The word Rtam (sounds like “writ-um”) is difficult to translate. It means something like “the way” in the Taoist sense of harmonious alignment with the flow of life. Richard Freeman translates Rtam Vadishyami as “I will declare the Way.”

I had the privilege of installing the painting, and we made a little ceremony of it. “Rtam Vadishyami takes my breath away,” Amee says, “every time I pass that wall.”

I hope you enjoyed learning about this painting and process. If you’re interested in commissioning a painting, please read this page. To follow along my creative process and support the work, I invite you to join me on Patreon. You can also receive periodic updates via my free newsletter.