By Josiah Bob Taundi

Anyone who wants some inner peace should see Vision: An Inner Journey, an exhibition of serene paintings by Deborah Robinson currently showing at Artpoint’s main gallery in Calgary.

Vision is a galore of flowers, landscapes and Oriental religious iconography. The whole mood of the show is enhanced by luxury ethnic Indian drapery adorned in-between and around the paintings, giving the exhibition space a fresh, rich interior decor.

The drapery/painting colour scheme is an art in itself. The ultimate effect makes the viewer feel the freshness of the air between. It’s beautiful.

But the show is not that simple. It’s actually an anti-thesis of common assumptions.

The profoundly catchy paintings Vision, Quan Yin, Rise and Flow of Compassion might easily cast Robinson’s work as religious art.

Vision is a bold statement combining the fluer-de-lis, flowers, some Indian goddess, Mother Mary and Buddha. Such confluence of compassion, piety and regality doesn’t happen in a rational world, more so ours that’s bloated by religious animosities.

Flow of Compassion depicts Buddha in his trademark meditative pose, sitting upon a waterfall in a virgin forest, while Rise show angels in ascension.

It’s easy, therefore, to overlook the other flower and landscape paintings like Extravagance, Passion, Calla or Promenade, River Landscape and Johnson Lake, as variety fillers of a religious art exhibition.

Robinson disputes all that. She explains she is more interested in the principles – not religion – of the Orient. The idea of the Vision show is simply to reveal the spiritual at a more conscious level. A flex of personal power, if you like.

Even her flower paintings, when studied carefully, reveal deeper meanings too. For instance, Lotus Bud depicts a budding flower which, when looked upside down, is in fact a heart. That same bud will bloom to life in Purple Lotus.

Rise challenges us to rethink the process of Ascension, ordinarily understood to be a departure from earth to heaven – terrestrial to celestial.

However, Robinson interprets it as the “rise of human consciousness on earth.”

“We can ascend when we ‘cross over’ but it can be done here on earth,” she points out, adding the painting is also a representation of the feminine power in us all that she says has been ignored for too long – invoking Dan Brown’s take of the feminine in his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code.

Blackening is cut from another cloth. An earlier acrylic on canvas and goldleaf piece, it’s a very hot coloured painting of crows and remnants of buildings. It’s an alchemy. Structures are burnt down in order to purify, much like the “phoenix rising from the ashes,” as the artist puts it. Yet at a common level it could easily be anything like getting rid of systems that are no longer needed, which could be they political, procedural or technological.

The whole Robinson idea is as human as it is common sensical but, above all, it’s art.

A trained musician, she invites us to “enjoy the open spaces, like silence between notes (and) discover your inner relationship to vision.”

More about Robinson’s praxis can be found on her official website www.blumoonart.com

“Vision: An inner Journey” is running from April 9th to April 30th, 2010