“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour”

With these immortal words, William Blake opens up a vista of limitless cosmic beauty. The landscape of his imagination seeks the sacred in the prosaic, divinity in the mundane, and universes of hidden meaning within the smallest things. A sense of wonder is born from his metaphorical vision of boundlessness and continuum. Something as humble as a grain of sand or a wild flower encapsulates the vastness of the whole world or a reflection of heaven. A microcosm becomes representative of the ubiquitous as one looks deep into the miniscule fragments of nature.

An illustrative depiction of these evocative lines plays out across this collection of mixed media artworks. The moon shines out of a densely stippled night sky against a filigree of fine-needle foliage. A pietra dura of outlined leaves is saturated with rich colour. Black and white forest mosaics are interspersed by garlands of individually painted flowers with tiny dotted centers. Old-fashioned dancers move against a golden sun, their draperies filled with clusters of blossom. Outsize pinwheels with heavily delineated fins overlap in Japanese fan-like formation. Metallic structures arc and strike upon intricately inked backgrounds. Webs of woven design stretch out on a bed of textured lustre. Filaments of gold and silver are etched in geometric symmetry. Harlequinesque diamonds flow in precise equilibrium of paint and pattern. Bronzed dots curve in a perpetual circular rhythm alongside ornamental lines.

Elements akin to leaf, bud, petal, bubble, and sand fill the most infinitesimal of spaces as a magnifying lens is held to nature’s tapestry. The sweep of the planet and all its microscopic particles are portrayed in concurrence, with layered internal minutiae providing texture and perspective to the outer panoramas. Whimsical in conception and intensely detailed, each hand-rendered composition embodies a focal spherical motif to emulate the poet’s holistic idea.

Mandira Ravindranath
May 2022