Heaven And Hell
Mar. 8th, 2024 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo Our pictures of Hell are quaint. Our pictures of Heaven are inadequate.
If our pictures of Hell are more interesting than our pictures of Heaven it's because gloom and horror are easier to visualise than light and love. The higher the vibration of a mental state the harder it is to create an image of it in coloured slime.
Those who have been to Heaven- visionaries and near-death-experiencers- speak of a light brighter than anything we know on earth and colours outside the range of our physical optics.
The only artist I know whose Heaven is more convincing than his Hell is Fra Angelico.
His Hell is almost perfunctory. It's brown, it's glum. It doesn't feel as if he had any fun painting it.
His heaven on the other hand is authentically joyous. There's colour, there's gold leaf. Angels and blesed souls join hands in a paradise garden then glide up into the glory of the heavenly city
But then Fra Angelico was a saint....
If our pictures of Hell are more interesting than our pictures of Heaven it's because gloom and horror are easier to visualise than light and love. The higher the vibration of a mental state the harder it is to create an image of it in coloured slime.
Those who have been to Heaven- visionaries and near-death-experiencers- speak of a light brighter than anything we know on earth and colours outside the range of our physical optics.
The only artist I know whose Heaven is more convincing than his Hell is Fra Angelico.
His Hell is almost perfunctory. It's brown, it's glum. It doesn't feel as if he had any fun painting it.
His heaven on the other hand is authentically joyous. There's colour, there's gold leaf. Angels and blesed souls join hands in a paradise garden then glide up into the glory of the heavenly city
But then Fra Angelico was a saint....
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Date: 2024-03-08 10:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-08 04:03 pm (UTC)