Striking picture of Adeyinka Olarinmoye. Life is good. Real art. I would like to relate intimately with this picture, enter into it and share its being.

 

Why?

 

How else may I do justice to a composition that is clearly celebratory of the joy of being alive, the powerful red at its centre exploding with the intensity of living, as the lady's features bulge with power in elegant curves?

 

The dominant muted light of the central figure created by the form of the laughing woman magnifies, by contrast, the crimson radiation at the portrait's centre, a burst of color emanating from the necklace at the lady's throat.

 

The placing of the jewelry centralizes its presence in the photograph, thereby foregrounding the visual power of the necklace as well as its evocative possibilities, poised as the necklace is at the juncture between the locus of self represented by the head and the conduit of nerves and life between head and body represented by the neck.

 

Some say the world is a vale of sorrow which humans need to endure. The Buddha, the founder of the religion of Buddhism, is described as declaring "One thing do I proclaim, brother, now and always, suffering and deliverance from suffering". At his inaugural sermon at the Deer park in Benares, he is quoted as stating that the universe is on fire.

 

On fire with the lust for life in its illusory transience, a transience like the flow of a stream on which nothing is still, everything changing as it moves in the consistent metamorphosis, why, therefore, should one stay attached to anything?

 

As the master declared, as he lay on his final resting place, preparatory to leaving the world and entering the supreme state of consciousnesses known as samadhi: "Seek your salvation with diligence. These are my last words!" What is this salvation? Abiding in that which is deathless, which is birthless, which is endless. That which is neither being nor non-being.

 

Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, David Benatar's evocatively titled work, bases its thesis on the argument that it is better if people did not exist because being born is against their own interests.

 

In contrast to these visions uninspired by the palpitations of blood in flesh, the flash of a smile in the pleasure of being, Adeyinka Olarinmoye's portrait says something different, evoking Milarepa's cry of pleasure in the exuberance of nature, seeing the beauty of the world and the beauty of ultimate reality as one, a unity of vision which is a later development of Buddhism possibly related to the poet/monk's reference to his meditation on the Two Bodhi-minds:

 

Bees are humming among the flowers,

Intoxicated by their fragrance;

In the trees, birds swoop and dart,

Filling the air with their song.

In Red Rock Jewel Valley

Young sparrows learn to fly,

Monkeys love to leap and swing,

And beasts to run and race,

While I practise the Two Bodhi-minds and love to meditate.

 

Milarepa poem from Sixty Songs of Milarepa.

Translated by Garma C.C. Chang.

Selected and introduced by Bhikkhu Khantipālo.

Buddhist Publication Society

Kandy • Sri Lanka

The Wheel Publication No. 95 / 97 (1980). p.3.

http://www.bps.lk/olib/wh/wh095.pdf.

Accessed 29 June 2013