Comment below: ** --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "jyouells2000" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Paul Mason" <premanandpaul@> > wrote: > > > > Does anyone have a copy of the photograph that t3rinity is referring > > to? It is to the left of MMY on page 53 of 'Thirty Years Around the > > World'. It looks like the photo that the puja portrait was painted > > from. An in-transit picture is at:- > > http://www.paulmason.info/gurudev/sources/text/GuidingLight.htm > > I thought that the puju portrait was painted by Dr. Varma , > Maharishi's uncle. > > JohnY > **Snip to End**
The portrait of Guru Dev that we received as initiators was signed by M.T.V. Acharya. I had always heard Dr. Varma referred to as Raj Varma, which I assumed was his name but could be just an honorific. So, depending on what Dr. Varma's name was, M.T.V. Acharya could be him and then Acharya would be a designation that he was at a high level of achievement as an artist. However, I don't believe that's the case at all, inasmuch as the styles between this portrait and all of Dr. Varma's other portraits are so radically different. Dr. Varma was a self-taught artist and all his paintings show elements characteristic of the auto-didact: problems with perspective, irregularities of scale, confusions between color and value, etc. The portrait we received for puja is a painting on top of a photo of Guru Dev (the same photo which can be found at Paul Mason's site, near the bottom of the opening page, among the quotes and reproduced in blue) and it seems that there are several different, earlier versions before the one we were given. This photo image of Guru Dev is likely the one that Maharishi used to color in when he was first heading south and began to teach. Since Dr. Varma was a photographer and photo retoucher, it's not unlikely that Maharishi would have had familiarity with and access to the photo retouching inks that he used in his profession. All of Dr. Varma's paintings of Guru Dev also utilize the same 3/4 pose of Guru Dev's body from that same photo; only in Dr. Varma's official portraits of Guru Dev on the lion throne he positions the head of Guru Dev so that it's a full frontal. An interesting (and not ineffective) technique but also very typical of what you'd expect of a self-taught artist. In the later years when Dr. Varma was just churning these paintings out they began to look quite grotesque with the head of Guru Dev becoming quite large relative to the body's proportions and sort of sinking down into the body so that the image had a kind of hunchbacked effect. Very much different from the erect, yet comfortable posture that Guru Dev always seems to abide in as shown in all the photos we have so far. Before I sent this I looked for and found a photo of a portrait of Maharishi painted by Dr. Varma sometime in the 80's. In the lower right hand corner of the image he has signed it Raj R.P. Varma. So that seems to conclusively prove that he didn't do the standard puja portrait. I'll upload a copy of that image to the files later. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
