The title refers to an ancient Buddhist and Hindu tradition of physical conditioning and spirituality in which "the ultimate goal is to transcend our human instincts and achieve divinity." Ruby Lee is quoted, "Art is an alchemical processing of Life! My work is a visual-emotional record of a journey into the human spirit and its archetypes.”
This huge 53x34 oil on canvas painting has a micro thread repair visible on the back. This was handled by the original gallery in Ojai, CA decades ago. It is nearly impossible to see on the painting and is otherwise flawless. The original wood carved frame is also excellent.
About the artist:
Just a few years after she began developing her own artistic style Ruby Lee became a permanent icon in American popular culture when she met the now famous hippy Wavy Gravy at a festival in California. Ruby Lee painted his portrait there which later became part of the famous poster designed by Alton Kelley. The portrait was then purchased by David Crosby(The Byrds, Crosby, Stills & Nash).
Popo and Ruby Lee were artist-legends on the California Coast. They met and married during the heyday of counterculture in San Francisco but lived in Ojai for five years. Both had worked as solo artists before they met, but one day on North Beach, in 1972, a handsome, dark-eyed man said to the pretty, petite Ruby Lee, “Let’s do a painting together!,” and the rest is history. A website dedicated to Ruby Lee, says that neither artist was in the habit of signing canvases, until one day in Ojai when the vice president of Disney Productions negotiated for one of their jointly painted canvases, clinching the deal by asking for a signature. So Ruby signed both “Popo and Ruby Lee,” and, as stated on the site mentioned above, “a Myth was born.” Many artists, Ruby Lee among them, paint in a series informed by their philosophy or worldview at a specific era of their lives. Ruby Lee’s life included the study of yoga and tai chi.
Looking through the books of a second hand bookstore in Soho, she noticed a bright yellow little book entitled “Karma and the Law of Cause and Effect”. In the popular art world, Andy Warhol was making statements with images of Campbell's Soup cans, John Cage was being heralded in the music of the avant-garde, Yoko Ono was climbing naked in and out of plastic bags at the Arts Lab, and Ruby Lee decided to leave the British Isles in search of the wisdom of the East that she had glimpsed in that tiny yellow book. The principal at her St. Martin’s School wished her well on her quest for illumination and reminded her to return the volume on Leonardo Da Vinci to the school library.
In a Chelsea restaurant called 'Muffins', Anthony Summers, once a journalist on BBC’s 24 Hours and now an author, bought one of her first oil paintings titled “Angie”. With this sale she left her few worldly possessions and embarked for the great unknown with a huge sense of adventure and armed with only a sketchbook and pencils. She ended up in Jerusalem. Influenced by the music of the times and experimenting with mind expanding substances, she was introduced to the posters of San Francisco’s psychedelic artists and to Stanley Kubrick’s iconic imagery of death and rebirth in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey."
This convergence of events led to a spiritual awakening and her course was redirected to the U.S. When she arrived in New York City in 1969 she headed for Northern California where she had heard about the flower children and the beliefs of the Native American Indians. In just a few years Ruby Lee would create this masterpiece considered to be a self-portrait.