The Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.
In my artistic vision, The Flow is a pathway to access The Zone, an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space of the no man’s land between the Noosphere and the individual.
This canvas is derived from the image of a river rapid to illustrate that The Zone can be a dangerous place for fragile minds. The Flow is a metaphysical river that meanders through The Zone and is the only way to access it. To find it, some people use hallucinogenic substances to widen their perception and might end up as addicts. Most people emerge from it as improved persons, some others with a broken mind.
“The Flow has its counterparts in the rivers that run through our civilizations like strings through beads, and there is hardly an age that is not associated with its own great waterway. The lands of the Middle East have dried to tinder now, but once they were fertile, fed by the fruitful Euphrates and the Tigris, from which rose flowering Sumer and Babylonia. The riches of Ancient Egypt stemmed from the Nile, which was believed to mark the causeway between life and death, and which was twinned in the heavens by the spill of stars we now call the Milky Way. The Indus Valley, the Yellow River: these are the places where civilizations began, fed by sweet waters that in their flooding enriched the land. The art of writing was independently born in these four regions, and I do not think it a coincidence that the advent of the written word was nourished by river water.” (Adapted quote from “To the River” by Olivia Laing)
Shaharee Vyaas 