Inspired by Sri Aurobindo
When we speak of beauty in women, we often mistake it as something fixed—skin, colour, form, proportion, movement. Yet beauty is not a simple arrangement of features. There are women without “ideal” forms or symmetry, and still they radiate something irresistible. What is it?
Sri Aurobindo pointed out that beauty is not merely in shape or surface but can arise from the vital—an energy, a force of life—or even deeper, from the psychic being that shines through. This is why beauty is never constant, never universal in the outer sense. What is beautiful for one culture may not be for another. What draws one temperament may leave another unmoved.
For me, as an artist, this insight is crucial. In figure drawing and nudes, I am not seeking a textbook anatomy of perfection. I am seeking to reveal what lies behind—the unseen rhythm that gives the form its resonance. Sometimes it is in the harmony of the vital force, sometimes in the quiet radiance of the inner being, sometimes even in a tension or rupture that unsettles the eye but stirs the soul.
To look at beauty without desire, without possession, as an artist does, is to begin to see as one sees a landscape, a flower, or a movement of light. It is to delight in beauty for its own sake. In this way, the nude becomes not an object of seduction but a window—onto spirit clothed in matter, onto consciousness inhabiting form.
Beauty in women, then, is not a fixed aesthetic but a dialogue: between inner and outer, spirit and body, the universal and the particular. My work tries to hold this tension, to let the invisible speak through the visible.
Why do I return so often to the human figure—especially the feminine form? Perhaps because the feminine, across cultures and centuries, has carried the burden and the gift of being seen as beauty incarnate. From temple sculptures in India to Greek statues, from cave paintings to Renaissance nudes, artists have always turned to the body as a vessel of aspiration, of spirit seeking form.
Sri Aurobindo reminds us that beauty is never just physical proportion. It can arise from the life-force, the vital radiance, or from the psychic depths that shine through. What we call “beautiful” is often a shifting standard of culture, temperament, or consciousness. Yet the human body—feminine and masculine alike—remains a field where these deeper forces reveal themselves.
For me, drawing the figure is not about idealizing or objectifying. It is about listening: tracing the geometry of a shoulder, the curve of a hip, the stance of a torso, until it speaks of something more than flesh. In the feminine, I often find an archetypal rhythm of receptivity, grace, and hidden strength. In the masculine, another rhythm—of structure, force, or groundedness. Both are necessary, both are aspirational.
Our cultural heritages testify to this. Every civilization has sculpted its gods and heroes, its mothers and lovers, in bodily form—not as decoration, but as a way to understand what it means to be human, to yearn, to transcend. In my work, the nude is not an end in itself, but a beginning: a doorway into the timeless dialogue between spirit and matter, visible and invisible, human and divine.