On paper, it is a dot.

The problem of the dot

I have spent more time thinking about this dot than about any triangle. Too large, and it becomes a circle, a shape among shapes. Too small, and it disappears. Too dark, and it reads as a hole. Too bright, and it reads as a jewel, something to look at rather than through.

Over the years I have tried:

• A drop of pure lamp black, laid in one touch with a fine brush.
• Raw gesso left unpainted, so the centre is the ground itself.
• Burnished gold, which catches the light only from certain angles.
• A single pinhole, so the bindu is literally an opening in the paper.

The pinhole is my favourite and the hardest to explain. Hung against a wall, it shows nothing. Held up to a window, the whole yantra gathers around a point of light.

Why it is left for last

In the drawing order I follow, the bindu is placed first, as the centre from which every measurement is taken, and completed last. For the whole time I am drawing, it is only a faint compass prick. Only when everything else is finished do I go back and make it visible.

There is something right about that. Everything in the figure depends on it, and nothing in the figure is it. The point is not a part of the drawing. It is the reason there is a drawing at all.

The rhythm becomes a ruler

A long yantra drawing involves hundreds of nearly identical gestures. Petal after petal, line after line. Somewhere around the fortieth petal the mind wanders, and the fortieth petal comes out a little different from the thirty-ninth.

With the mantra running quietly, each petal takes the same number of repetitions. The sound becomes a kind of metronome. When a petal takes two more repetitions than its neighbours, I look again, and usually find that something drifted.

What changed

1. Consistency. The repeated forms in my drawings are noticeably more even.
2. Pace. I stopped rushing the boring parts. The mantra doesn’t care whether the section is interesting.
3. Honesty. I can feel the moment my attention leaves the line, because the mantra stumbles at the same instant.
4. Fatigue. Strangely, long sessions are less tiring. The mind has one job instead of a dozen.

A caution

In the tradition, a mantra is received from a teacher and treated with care. I don’t think it is a productivity trick, and I would not recommend borrowing someone else’s sacred syllables to finish a commission faster. What I am describing is the other direction: practice leaking into the studio, rather than the studio using practice.

The line and the syllable both come from the breath. Neither should be hurried.

She showed almost none of it. When she died in 1944, she left instructions that the work should not be shown for at least twenty years. She believed the world was not ready.

The practice behind the painting

Af Klint did not arrive at abstraction through a theory of form. She arrived through practice. With four other women she met for years in a group they called The Five, holding séances, recording messages, and making automatic drawings. She was drawn to Theosophy, and later to Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy.

Whatever one makes of the messages, the method is recognisable to anyone in a contemplative tradition. Regular sessions. A vow of seriousness. Images received rather than designed, then worked into finished form with great care.

Paintings for a temple

The word temple is the key. Like a yantra or a thangka, these were not made to decorate a wall. They were meant to be used: arranged in a specific building, walked through, contemplated in sequence. The temple was never built, so the paintings waited in storage, rolled and stacked, for decades.

When they were finally seen widely, the response was overwhelming. Her 2018 retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York became the most visited exhibition in that museum’s history.

What I take from her

• Make the work the practice asks for, not the work the market asks for.
• Keep records. Her notebooks are half the reason we can understand the paintings at all.
• Trust the slow audience. Some images need their viewers to arrive.

I don’t expect anyone to wait twenty years for my paintings. But I think about her whenever I am tempted to make something simply because it will be liked this week.

I have been testing pigments for a large Kali for most of this spring. These are my notes.

The candidates

What happened

Lamp black alone was too quiet. It sat on the surface like a hole. Bone black was more alive but went flat when dry.

The figure came to life when I laid indigo first, in thin washes that dried almost blue, and built the black on top in a few loose passes. Where the black thinned, the blue showed through like light in a night sky. It moves when you walk past it.

The ones I left out

Two traditional colours did not make it onto the palette: cinnabar for the red of her tongue, and orpiment for the yellow of her ornaments. Both are beautiful. Cinnabar is mercury sulphide and orpiment is arsenic. I use modern substitutes and wear a mask anyway.

There is an old instruction to prepare colours as part of the worship, grinding them in silence before the painting begins. I have started doing this, mostly because it is the only time in the day my hands are busy and my mind is not. The goddess of time asks you to take your time.

The rules are the point

Coming from art school, my instinct was to resist this. Wasn’t the artist supposed to invent? But a thangka is not a self-portrait of the painter’s taste. It is a support for visualisation. A practitioner will spend years building that exact figure in the mind’s eye, and the painting has to match the text so the two can meet.

Once that sank in, the grid stopped looking like a cage. It is a promise: everyone who looks at this figure will find the same body in the same place.

What the grid leaves open

Plenty, as it happens:

• The landscape around the figures, the clouds, rocks, water and flowers, is where painters have always shown their hand.
• Line quality cannot be measured. Two painters can follow the same grid and produce two completely different presences.
• Colour transitions, the soft shading built up in dozens of thin layers, belong to the painter alone.
• Gold work, burnished and then incised with fine patterns, is a whole art inside the art.

What I took from it

I now begin most large paintings with a measured underdrawing, even when nothing in the final image looks geometric. The grid disappears under the paint, but the figure stays where it was put. And because I am no longer deciding where everything goes, there is more attention left for how it goes there.

That is the strange gift of a strict form. It takes away the decisions that never mattered, and gives you back the ones that do.

Rasa, or flavour

The older Natyashastra, the classical treatise on drama, said that a good performance produces rasa in its audience. The word means juice, essence, taste. You do not merely watch a tragedy; you taste sorrow, transformed into something you can savour.

The classical list names eight rasas, and Abhinavagupta argued hard for a ninth:

Why the ninth matters

For Abhinavagupta, shanta, the rasa of peace, sits underneath all the others. When we taste any emotion in art, we taste it without the personal stake that makes it painful in life. The grief on stage is not my grief. For a moment, the small self that usually owns every feeling steps aside.

That moment, he said, is a glimpse of the same freedom the tantric practitioner works toward. The cultivated viewer, the sahridaya, literally “one with a heart”, is already halfway there. He called the experience camatkara: a kind of astonished relishing, the mind savouring its own awareness.

Art is the rehearsal. Practice is the performance that never closes.

In the studio

I think about this when a painting is going well. There is a point where I stop making decisions and start tasting them, where the colour on the brush is not mine but simply happening. It never lasts. But Abhinavagupta gave me a vocabulary for it, and a reason to believe it is not an accident.

The structure

Four triangles point upward and are read as Shiva, consciousness. Five point downward and are read as Shakti, power. Their overlaps produce forty-three smaller triangles around the central point, the bindu. The whole figure is read from the outside in as nine enclosures:

Each enclosure has its own goddesses, its own mantras and its own stage in the practitioner’s journey inward.

Where it goes wrong

The difficulty is that the lines are not independent. In a well-drawn Sri Yantra, three lines meet at a single point again and again across the figure. Move one triangle’s base by a hair and a dozen intersections drift apart into tiny slivers.

There is no simple construction that makes every crossing exact. Draftsmen have worked out approximations for centuries, and mathematicians still write papers about it. By hand, the honest answer is patience.

How I draw it

1. Lay down the centre line and the circle that will hold the triangles. Everything is measured from these two.
2. Mark the heights of the triangle bases along the centre line before drawing a single diagonal.
3. Draw the largest downward triangle first, then the largest upward one. Check every crossing with a loupe before continuing.
4. Work inward, one pair at a time, correcting the marks as the errors show themselves.
5. Only when the triangles are settled, add the lotus rings and the square.

A careful drawing takes me most of a day. The first few I made took a week and went in the drawer.

I used to think the errors were a failure of craft. Now I think they are the practice. The yantra asks for a kind of attention that cannot drift for even one line, and it shows you, with complete honesty, the moment that it did.

A word for a kind of book

A tantra is, first of all, a text. The word comes from a root meaning to stretch or weave, and it was used for a loom and for the warp threads on it. From roughly the middle of the first millennium onward, Indian traditions produced a large body of scriptures that called themselves tantras, and the practices they taught came to share the name.

They were not one religion. There are Shaiva tantras, Shakta tantras centred on the Goddess, Vaishnava and Jain material, and the vast Buddhist tantric canon that travelled to Tibet. What they share is a method rather than a creed.

What the texts actually teach

Read the tantras themselves and most of the pages are taken up with things that would bore a workshop audience:

• Initiation. Practice begins with diksha, a formal transmission from a teacher. Nothing is meant to be taken from a book alone.
• Mantra. Sound treated as the subtle body of a deity, repeated with exact pronunciation and count.
• Diagram. The yantra and the mandala, drawn as a dwelling place for the deity and as a map of the practitioner’s own body and mind.
• Visualisation. Long, precise meditations in which the deity is built up detail by detail, then dissolved.
• Ritual. Worship, offerings, fire ceremonies, the purification of the elements in one’s own body.

The famous transgressive rites existed. They were a small, guarded part of a few lineages, and their point was the overturning of the practitioner’s sense of pure and impure, not pleasure for its own sake.

The body is not the obstacle. It is the instrument, and it has to be tuned.

Why it matters to a painter

What drew me in was not the transgression but the diagrams. Here was a tradition that took images seriously: an image could be inhabited, could be entered, could change the person who made it. Most of what I paint starts there.

That is what this blog is for. Not a sales pitch for a practice, but notes from someone who draws yantras by hand and reads the old commentaries slowly, and who keeps finding that the studio and the meditation seat are the same room.