Chromology

Applied Chromology uses colors to create physical, emotional, mental and spiritual equilibrium, in order to bring Harmony to our life.
Anna Chromy’s “Chromology” paintings use colors and scenery to describe each a particular challenge faced by humanity and its potential solutions.
The first series consists of 12 + 1 paintings. Every painting incorporates one of Anna’s sculptures, with their spiritual origin rooted in Ancient Greek Myths, and the lessons we can draw from them for our today’s world. These universal myths have the power to explain the essential structure of life, its natural equilibrium with nature, and the Harmony we can attain if we change the lopsided way of today’s thinking.

The second series, still in progress, deals with other burning questions we will have to solve in order to achieve a “Revolution of Sustainability”. The symbol for this change to a new Harmony is the “Cloak of Conscience”, symbolized in the trophy of the “Chromys”.

The Mirror

Posted by Admin on December 6, 2012

200cm x 150cm

“You know my judgement on the enterprise called Life: There are only two things. Two. The only two things that transform us into beings capable and worthy of surmounting all that reduces us to being undistinguishable from all others… Love and Work. But to give them an extreme and new sense , combined, Love becoming Work”.

Anna Chromy - The Mirror(Paul Valérie)

Pointing my Cloak to my companion I look into the Mirror of fifty years of togetherness in love. Three times in my life I had a close brush with death, and it was the love for my companion and creation as a whole which helped me to overcome my sufferance. After the last incident this deep experience led to the birth of the Cloak,  a sculpture empty only in appearance, but filled with our Soul and our Conscience.

In this work my Love has become Work, which certainly helps to explain its attraction on every viewer. Many people today feel discouraged and disoriented. They are convinced to be powerless and therefore don’t even try. When I decided to create my Cloak from a single bloc of white Carrara marble, with a weight of 250 tons, many people thought I had definitely gone over the top. When I showed them that I was able to brave for four long years the harsh Tuscan winter, with temperatures of minus 20 centigrade, and the burning summers with up to 40, the incredulity changed into respect.

It is this enthusiasm, this Divine Energy, which I want to share with everybody who sees my Cloak, and tell them:  You can do it as well. Standing in front of the Cloak, as in this painting, conveys a sense of mystery. For Albert Einstein “the most beautiful experience we can have in life is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art“. The dramatic, musically flowing folds of the Cloak help us to perceive this message. They convey a feeling of warmth and beauty, and induce love into our hearts, a true mirror of our soul. Once you step inside the Cloak you get the strange feeling of something impenetrable, an energy which does not belong to us. It is an energy and magnetism which helps us to open our spiritual faculty of regeneration and allows us to perceive the hidden, eternal, truth.

 

The Wall

Posted by Admin on September 5, 2012

200cm x 150cmThe Wall Chromology

“Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of the age of ages. The Temple Mount is a great ship… The shofar sounds out sunset: one more has set sail…” (Yehuda Amichai).

Three and a half billion people on earth, half of the world’s population, believe Jerusalem is the center of the world, and for many the Temple Mount or Har Moriyah, with the Kotel, also known as Wailing or Western Wall, as the focus of this center. The sort of this oldest and holiest of all cities will decide the future of the world. If Nir Barkat, the current Jerusalem Mayor, can realize his vision to make the Jewish capital a city of freedom of religion and equal rights for all, he will have rendered a tremendous service to mankind.

Several years ago I created for “Pax Medicalis”, an association of Jewish, Muslim and Christian doctors, the “Golden Olive” trophy, a prize awarded every year to personalities who have worked for peace between the three monotheistic religions. The 2009 winner was Elie Wiesel. Tolerance and peace are essential components of conscience. It was therefore natural for me to close the “Chromology” cycle of paintings, which is together with the Cloak of Conscience my artistic testimony to the different aspects of the Chromy Awards, with a work about the holiest of cities.

As its name says it, the Cloak is the symbol of conscience, of ethics and morals, as they have been expressed for over 2000 years in the halakhah and other writings about ethics, represented by the Menorah. The Torah, to which I made an allusion in my “Golden Olive” trophy, lays down the fundamental teachings which the Cloak shall recall to all people: Kindness to the needy, benevolence, faith, compassion for the suffering, a shalom-, peace-loving disposition, and a truly and contrite spirit, as the virtues which the Prophets hold up for emulation.

Loving kindness, justice, truth and peace, have to remain the pillars of our society. The Cloak and the Chromys shall remind us that these virtues are at the roots of a happy future for mankind. Once the Cloak in marble will have found its final destination “Next year at the Cloak” shall replace the greeting of our grandparents “Next year in Jerusalem”.

The Bridge

Posted by Admin on August 5, 2012

 

The Bridge Chromology200cm x 150cm

“…..music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts” (T.S. Eliot, the Dry Salvages, in The four Quartets).

The absence of sound can be felt either in movement or in silence. When there is no sound we say that we don’t hear, but this does not mean we are not listening. In fact, without sound our ear is even more attentive, and when there is sound the quality of listening is inferior. Today we are everywhere flooded with music, destroying the precious space of silence, indispensable to understand the harmony of music. And a similar phenomenon is at work with our conscience.

From the dawn of times man has felt inside himself a voice, not belonging to him, the “Voice of Conscience”, which spurs or restrains him when he intends to do something, and which judges and blames him after having finished his task. To whom belongs this voice, where is it coming from? Everybody will answer this according to his beliefs.

However one thing is certain, the voice of conscience has the nature of a call, an awakening. This call happens in total silence, does not confirm anything and gives no information on worldly events; it is a call to our inner self, to the potential hidden in us. To hear this call one has to be concentrated in an appropriate place, providing total silence and shielding from the outside world, a space like my Cloak of Conscience, or the Bridge to a new Conscience in this painting.

Music allows us to attain a unique feeling of interior peace, indispensable to hear the Voice of Conscience. When I created my Cloak in total silence I felt physically the melodies of the Commander or “Stone Guest” in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the “Dies Irae” in his Requiem. When I created my Musicians I heard the eternal music of Gaia, our Earth, expressed in the rivers flowing from the Himalaya, the Andeans and the Alps into the Sea which unites them all.

The Amazon, with its Flute of the Andeans, the Ganges with the Indian Cither, the Mississippi with the Jazz Trumpet of New Orleans, and the Danube with the Violin of my Central European home, they all play the eternal music of Mother Earth. Only Nile is without an instrument. He uses for his dance, crossing the centuries, the ropes which were used in old times for the geometrical measurement of the fertile soil after each flood.

As long as the rivers flow Gaia’s music will continue and Conscience will guide the world.

The Net

Posted by Admin on June 19, 2012

The Net200cm x 150cm

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed” (Albert Einstein).

The biggest mystery is life itself. I spend a great amount of time observing nature and understanding the animal world. My Alcyon sculpture was born through the observation of the acrobatic flights of the seagulls in front of my window, which looks out to the Mediterranean. Their harmonic movements, full of elegance, lightness, freedom and effortlessness fill me with awe and joy. Year after year I see the same couples build their nests and raise their off-springs. They behave with incredible intelligence, remembering exactly the hour and the place where to find food, even knocking at my window when I’m late with my contribution.

Although my origins lie in the center of Europe, a large portion of my life has evolved around the Mediterranean. Many of my sculptures are a contemporary interpretation of ancient Greco-Roman Myths, while others draw on the Jewish-Christian heritage of this cradle of Western Civilization. But this sea between Europe, Africa and Asia is in fragile equilibrium, just like my sculpture. It is endangered by overfishing, pollution and endless construction on its shores. Although it is still one of the most biologically diverse seas in the world, 20% of its species are endangered, with the seal shown in my painting among the 10 most endangered world-wide.

The Alcyon of the Antique Myths is plunging at the risk of her life in order to save her husband from the sea. The Gods were so moved by this act of love and abnegation that they gave her the wings of a seagull. Is this not a wonderful parable for our own life? We are all like a drop in the ocean, plunging to find our companion and dissolving in this quest. Only our feelings of love and empathy give us hope for our salvation. Let us include our animal friends in these considerations.

To promote these values we have created the Chromy Awards. I was therefore particularly glad to present the first Trophy to Paul Watson and his Sea Shepherd Foundation at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, in recognition of their often perilous actions to protect the whales, sharks, seals and other endangered species of the seas.

The Heart

Posted by Admin on May 12, 2012

The Heart

200cm x 150cm

“Et dabo vobis cor novum et spiritum novum ponam in medio vestry. Et auferam cor lapideum de carne vestra et dabo vobis cor carneum”. (“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put into you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” Ezekiel 36.26). This is the phrase I engraved in the bottom of my sculpture “Heart of the World”. It is illustrated by a pile of discarded hearts of stone and the Cloak filled with our Conscience. Above rises a heart with the portrait of John Paul II, holding a child protectively in his arm.

The Holy Father had a special love for the children of our world, for those suffering from sexual and economic exploitation, from hunger, disease and malnutrition. They form an army of millions of innocent beings, lining the streets of our megacities and fighting in armed conflicts. It’s first and foremost them which we have to love and protect. It is not paradise in the sky, but acts of selflessness and love that bring God’s sacred space and grace to a broken world suffused with tragedy, until the unknown hour when the world is made whole again.

It was an unforgettable day on May 18th 2002, when I was invited, in the company of my husband and the Archbishop of Salzburg, to the Papal Audience on Saint Peters square in Rome. When it was my turn to kneel in front of Papa Wojtyla, and explain the meaning of my sculpture, my present for his 82nd birthday, I thought I would faint. I knew in this moment, that I had encountered the Conscience of our World, a Heart embracing all of us with his immense Love.

On this Morning, in front of Pope John Paul II, I made the vow to transform my Cloak sculpture into a chapel, where everybody would be able to meditate and rediscover his inner self. The idea was reinforced in a discussion with the Abbott of the Monastery and Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, where he encouraged me with a phrase of the Saint, suggesting “to use our own body as a Cloak, in the absence of an appropriate place to pray”.

I believe that we artists have a special duty to labor for the improvement of this world. Aleksandr Solzhenyzin expressed this beautifully with the following words: “ Artists possess a sharper Conscience of the Harmony of our world than us others, a conscience that they have to transmit to others. This permanent harmony is the reflection of God, which preserves us from brutalization. This is also the meaning of Dostojewski’s “Beauty which will save the world”.

Conscience, as the Echo of the Spirit in our Free Will, shall radiate from my Cloak; and the most appropriate place to do so would be at “Roma Caput Mundi”, the spiritual capital of the world.

 

 

 

 

 

The Volcano

Posted by Admin on April 13, 2012

200cm x 150cm

“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” (William Blake).

The Volcano

In his wonderful book “Le Cosmos et le Lotus” the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan shows us that, “we are all dust of the stars, that we share the same cosmic history with animals and plants, and that we are all connected throughout space and time, giving us an acute sense of interdependence inducing compassion into our hearts. We realize that our happiness depends on all others. It makes us aware of the vulnerability of our planet and of our isolation in the universe and it gives us the understanding that our industrial poisons, our nuclear scores and the greenhouse gases affect us all, independent from any national, cultural or religious boundary”.

So why is it then that humanity is not living according to this insight? Is it all Prometheus’ fault or also our own? When Prometheus stole the fire from Zeus and gave it to humanity, the Gods took a terrible revenge, by inducing Pandora to open her box containing all evils of the world. The box is still open today, and the evils described above are spreading uncontrolled across the globe. Once out of the box they are almost impossible to put back. Albert Einstein, the father of nuclear fission, has made this sobering experience, when he tried to stop the development of the nuclear bomb based on his scientific discoveries.

We are therefore all sitting on a volcano, like the Kung-Fu monks of the Shaolin Monastery, shown in my painting. We should listen to them, because the Monks know from their practice of Zen Buddhism, that our lived interdependence requires irresistible compassion towards all beings. The Monks teach us, that, like in Einstein’s case, it is not enough to know, because scientific, rational thoughts have their limit. They must be complemented by mystical or religious intuition, the arts and poetry in our approach of final reality.

Of the trilogy Love, Faith, Hope, essential for life, the only thing not to escape from Pandora’s box was Hope. So Hope is still there, hope that humanity will hear the Voice of Conscience and rediscover the Force of Love. Should we fail, we can still try to follow the example of Prometheus in my painting: Burned by fire, and unable to close Pandora’s box, he decides to escape to the Moon.

The Rings

Posted by Admin on March 28, 2012

The Rings

 

200cm x 150cm

“Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger) is the Motto of the Olympic Games. It was De Coubertin’s, the founder of modern Olympics, belief, that everybody should compete against themselves, not for money or other rewards, but for the satisfaction to give ones best in fair and peaceful competition.

The Olympics are still today a shining example of this spirit, but cannot help to get more and more entangled with the hunger of money devouring our society, where an individual is not considered anymore for his human values and his creativity, but for what he has, how much he makes. Today the Olympic Motto could quite well be confused as a description of the bonus system in finance and industry.

When I created my Olympic Spirit no material consideration crossed my mind. My sole aim was to portray in this sculpture the benefits of peaceful and fair competition through cooperation. The fact that thousands of athletes from all countries and continents come together in the Olympic Village and live side by side for several weeks is in my belief an all-important aspect of the Games. I therefore imagined from the beginning only one adequate location for this sculpture – the Olympic Village of the London 2012 Olympics.

But there is another important aspect: I strongly believe that our exaggerated individualism and egoism has led us into a dead end. We have to realize that we all are residents of the same global village, that we depend on each other and have to cooperate with each other. The three athletes of my Olympic Spirit can only remain upright, in their precarious balance, if they trust and support each other. They climb high and fast with a happy mind and in harmonious cooperation.

Why can’t this work in the same way for everybody? Not everybody can compete in the Olympic Games. But why not measure the happiness of people and nations through something like the Happy Planet Index, which allows measuring success in other than monetary terms, just like the Olympic medals?

The three athletes of my Olympic Spirit are protected from evil by the Eye of Horus, just like the London Games in its center. They have trained relentlessly to show their prowess and portray the best of themselves to the world. They are happy to have achieved their goal and to participate in the greatest games on earth. May my Spirit inspire many others that – yes, they can do it as well.

The Bear

Posted by Admin on March 19, 2012

Chromology - The Bear200cm x 150cm

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe” is a famous saying of Albert Einstein.

In the Orphic cosmogony Chronos/Time produced Aether (pure,fresh air and clean sky) and Chaos, thus giving humans a choice. In the beginning it looked promising. Aether/Oxygen had increased over two billion years from 1 to 21% of the air with an equivalent reduction in carbon dioxide, allowing the appearance of numerous new forms of life.

Since the beginning of the last century man has reversed this virtuous cycle by reinserting enormous quantities of carbon fossils into the air, raising inexorably the temperature of the planet. This has led to the sixth crisis of extinction in the history of our planet. But contrary to past crisis which developed over millions of years, the current crisis evolves within less than a century .

Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, wrote already in the middle of the 19th century: “Man has now acquired such domination over the material world and such a power to increase in number, that most likely the whole surface of the globe will be invaded by this anomaly (man), until the annihilation of all other beautiful and marvelous species.”

Biodiversity vanishes at a rhythm thousand times faster than normal, with over 20.000 species lost per year and those left desperately clinging to their habitat, like the monkeys in my painting and the Polar Bear, who sees the ice vanishing under his feet. It’s a sad moment for animal lovers like me, who are used to communicate on a daily basis with our friends.

But it might get even worse, because it is said, that once the last bee has been extinct, it will take only four years until it’s the turn for us humans. We are at the eleventh hour to heed the appeal of the Cloak to our Conscience and stop the dance of Chronos around the ticking clock of extinction.

The Chrystal

Posted by Admin on February 27, 2012

200cm x 150cm

“Something is rotten in the state of Europe”

The Chrystal by Anna Chromy

Europe’s current state of affairs can be best described by paraphrasing the anguished cry of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to his father’s ghost. In fact what is left of the great Pan-European movements created by our fathers: A bureaucratic administration without soul or faith, uniting an ever increasing number of states in which an increasing number of citizens does not recognize themselves.

If the financial and economic support of Greece, the cradle of European and Western Civilization, and thus an essential part of Europe, creates a highly acrimonious debate in the richer parts of the Union, there is something rotten about European cooperation; If a right-wing party can gain strength by agitating against foreigners, proposing to close the borders and abandon the European currency, there is something very rotten with the identity of Europe; If there is a large section of public opinion denying Russia its role in Europe, there is something rotten about the geographical and historical understanding of Europe.

Seen from China, the upcoming world power, Europe is a tiny spot on the map, without a definite identity. The little states that make up this nonentity are meaningless to the Chinese. And the political movements gaining strength in these tiny entities are proposing to retreat to even smaller entities, and thus to total irrelevance.

500 Years ago Europe reinvented the World. Coming at a time of political upheaval and economic distress, the Renaissance inaugurated a golden age for Europe and the Western world. It helped the creation of the modern, sovereign states, the emergence of a unified culture based on a perception of aesthetic senses and the arts, and the development of the humanistic ideology placing all its faith in man. It took the Chinese inventions and turned them into the weapons of its new scientific progress (China has reversed this process today) based on the Judeo-Christian concept of the “Laws of Nature” given by a supreme legislator.

What this tells us for today’s Europe is that you cannot build a political entity of common destiny based on the stomach alone. We need to engage the soul and win-over the spirits and hearts as well. We have to create a clear patriotic profile which people can easily understand and love, based on the best our continent has to offer, artistically, scientifically and spiritually, basically a new Conscience for Europe.With the sculpture ” Europe” I would like to help build this European Conscience and create an alliance open to all Europeans interested to participate in this European Renaissance.

The braking white wave on which my Europe is riding represents the tumultuous history of our continent. It replaces godfather Zeus, disguised as a white bull in the older representations of the myth, and represents an important element of Europe’s past and future, – the Seas. The seemingly fragile woman on the crest of the wave steers firmly towards the shores of a promised land, new Europe. The sculpture is irradiated by the multicolored light of a heavenly crystal, the image of our faith.

For Dostoyevsky “Europe is terrible and sacred”. Let’s do everything to make it less terrible and more sacred for our children and make them again the masters of their destiny. The Lollys dancing around the time warp/sphere, in which we have entangled ourselves, reminds us that the time to solve our problems is counted. Let’s hope Europe can rescue us again. If not we’ll have soon a yellow smile on our faces.

The Rock

Posted by Admin on

200cm x 150cm

“You must imagine Sisyphus happy”, said Albert Camus talking about his lonely hero of the absurd, as “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart”.

The Rock

In this way the punishment of the boulder rolling down the slope, every time before Sisyphus can reach the top, acquires a positive meaning in a material sense. But in my belief it takes more to give our life a meaning than the daily struggle to survive. It is the love for our family, our friends and all living beings which gives us a hope to reach eternity.

My Sisyphus with his family, climbing the slopes of the highest mountains, shows him alone on his final road to Nirvana: “The conscience without attributes, without limits, everywhere shining”. Maybe we artists are privileged in the way seen by Camus. For him “To create means to live twice, the only chance to keep our conscience”. Considering that for him “Conscience is more important than life”, we can consider creativity as the essence of our human condition.

Together with our conscience it allows us to surpass the apparent absurdity and give a meaning to our existence. Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” was my first book in French when I settled over 40 years ago in this country and it has never stopped to inspire my life and my creations.

The Boat

Posted by Admin on

200cm x 150cm

“When the wind blows into our eyes our soul gives us wings”

The Boat by Anna Chromy

These were the wings which directed Ulysses back home after his Odyssey. It is these wings who have opened for me the door to the Orient, to a culture so profoundly different from ours, and though not alien to my thinking. As explained in the opening speech for my “Spiritus Mundi” exhibition in China, it is the Universal Conscience, independent from the country where we live or the culture in which we were raised, which enables us to perceive the deeper truth of life on our planet.

To see the Chinese Penelope (Yin) wait for her Odysseus (Yang) reminds me of the words of Lao Tzu: “There was something undivided and complete, coming into existence before Heaven and Earth. How still it was and formless, standing alone, and undergoing no change, reaching everywhere and in no danger of being exhausted. It may be regarded as the Mother of all things. I do not know its name, and I give it the designation of the TAO”.

When young we travel to conquer, in age our roots start pulling, directing us back to our port of departure, as if this could be a salvation from our inexorable end. Ulysses and the Odyssey are thus a paradigm, a mirror of ourselves. We spend our life finding ways toward knowledge, conquering the world by overcoming more or less successfully one obstacle after another, and the moment we reach our final destination we leave this existence, only to start another. What is left back on earth is our love, our Conscience, symbolized in my Cloak.

Although I’m fairly advanced on my Odyssey I’m still feeling this insatiable curiosity which has allowed me in the last years to discover the incredible riches of Chinese culture and I’m grateful for this wonderful experience. Penelope has to wait, – I’m still on my way.

 

The Violoncello

Posted by Admin on

200cm x 150cm

“Which beauty will save the world”? This was the question of Dostoevsky in his novel “The Idiot”. It is the question of the atheist Hippolit to Prince Myskin: “Is it true, Prince, that you said one day that the world will be saved by Beauty? But which beauty?” Myskin, who held with infinite compassion the hand of the young man who was dying at the age of 18, remained silent, underlining that the beauty which saves the world is the love which shares the pain.

The Violoncello from the collection "Chromology"

Beauty is in a sense the visible expression of the Good, as the good is the metaphysical condition for beauty. The harmony of Eurydice’s body echoes forever in the Violoncello which she leaves to her beloved Orpheus after her demise. The image of Eurydice in Planet Venus is the message that the Universe is filled with beauty and compassionate love. It is this beauty irradiated by truth and justice in life which touches deeply our hearts.

According to the philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, humanity, after having discovered Fire for its first stage of development, has to discover the forces of Love for its second. The mystical transformation of Eurydice is the sign of a world to come, a message of consolation and hope: A loss which we consider irreplaceable can generate new strength and talents in ourselves.

To us artists is given the possibility to express the visible of the invisible, to allow the mysterious to be transformed into image. The capacity to discover, create, irradiate something with the fire of beauty has an analogy with the beauty of Divine fire. There is an ethic, a “Spirituality” of the artistic creation which contributes to life and to the salvation of humanity. The perfect body of Eurydice is the embodiment of this spirituality.

 

The Door

Posted by Admin on

200cm x 150cm

“Follow the voice of the Cloak – your Conscience – and open the door to a better future.”

The Door, Anna Chromy

 

By following these rules…

Overcome your fears, – the fear of the unknown, and fear of the others. Don’t be against, – be for it. There is only one God, one Truth, – not belonging to any particular religion or philosophy. Stop falling into the trap of all the interested propaganda serving only special interest groups. Be just; renounce anger and all forms of violence. Don’t feel victim; stop trying to appear what you are not; be what you are. Stop buying things you don’t need; exaggerated love of money is the source of all evil. Be generous; to give is more rewarding than to take. Be compassionate; the contrary of love is indifference, not hate. Be peaceful; the contrary of peace is chaos, not violence. Shed your apathy,- you can make a difference. Leave your self-inflicted isolation and invest in relations with others

The way will not always be easy, because Conscience develops and deepens gradually. But already on the way you will feel some of the physical benefits of the recovery of your real self: your immune system will work better; your blood pressure will lower, allowing you a longer, healthier life. And your changed relationship with others will make this a more livable world.

I have gone through this Door myself and experienced some of these benefits when I created the first Cloak in plaster. It happened at the end of a long period of suffering due to an accident and the Cloak marked for me the end of this period and the beginning of a new era full of hope and of new found creative energy.

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