2017 Image-Art Calendar

(click to enlarge)

In 2008, Adi Da personally directed the development of the first Transcendental Realism calendar of His Divine Image-Art — including its monumental scale, quality of image reproduction, and layout. The calendar has brought great joy and beauty to the home of devotees, Da Plastique public contacts, families and friends for the last eight years.

2017 marks the ninth consecutive year Da Plastique has produced an Image-Art calendar. We are thrilled to announce that the 2017 Transcendental Realism calendar is at the printer. It features radiant imagery from Adi Da's extraordinary suite, Oculus One: The Reduction Of The Beloved, and it is spectacular! (See below for sample pages.) This calendar marks the tenth anniversary of Adi Da's creation of Oculus One in 2007. It primarily showcases previously unpublished images from the suite (see below). Enjoy the exquisite geometric and figurative abstraction of Oculus One throughout the year with this magnificent 2017 calendar.

The Lover I and The Widow I from Oculus One
on exhibit at the 2007 Venice Biennale

The Lover I and The Widow I from Oculus One
on exhibit at the 2007 Venice Biennale

(click to enlarge)

The subtitle of Oculus One — The Reduction Of The Beloved — is a direct reference to Adi Da's thesis on modernism, "The Reduction Of The Beloved To Shape Alone", written during His graduate studies at Stanford University. And, indeed, in Oculus, He restores abstraction to its original, liberating purpose.

The female figure in Oculus One can be seen to be the beloved—in a progress from lover to bride to wife to widow—who is being “reduced” by that process, and also reduced to love itself, or to loving while being alone. It also can be understood that “the beloved” is not that figure, but that the female figure is relating to one beloved to her.

There is nothing necessarily negative implied in the title, "The Reduction Of The Beloved To Love Alone". There is a kind of realization in that, rather than loss—though there is also a suggestion of loss, being alone. All such meanings are intended, and are there to be felt.

The forms of the lover, the bride, the wife, and the widow show the same attitude—the same ecstatic, contemplative head and figure altogether. The same posture is the sign of all the figures, but each has unique iconographic attributes. There are differences in the breast forms, in the hair, in the color of the chairs. For instance, the wife figure has a combined black and white chair. One foot in bed and one foot in the grave. In other words, the wife form is in between life and death, participating in both. The breasts are down-pointing—suggesting perhaps the nursing of a child, without having a child in the image. There is no wild hair—the hair is pulled back. Hair suggests the characteristic of orientation to sexuality and life-energy. So the wife shows more maturity, more age, and so forth. And yet, it is still the same attitude and state as the other female figures.

In the widow form, the background is a kind of collision between all the previous ones. It is a shattered structure. The widow is a kind of shattered structure in the black form. Yet the widow form has the same attitude, the same disposition, the same contemplative and surrendered disposition that is characteristic of all the forms of the figure in this suite. So the differences are in the mode of how the life-characteristics are shown outwardly. The disposition otherwise shows steadiness—a continuously ecstatic, contemplative, and surrendered disposition, surrendered to what is above and what is beyond. This feminine figure is not affected by life-changes. It is always in the same disposition and surrendered in the context of life-changes.

These are not ironic images, nor mere conventional realism in showing the changing female form. There is perhaps something comic about them, but only in the sense that there is something comic about the human process itself. They are a reflection of how the natural process happens and how life-stages happen, and a communication of unaffectedness and surrender, serenity, contemplation.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
in Mei-Ling Israel, "Primal Views: Root-Shape and Root-Color"

Needless to say, the 2017 Image-Art calendar makes a very special gift for friends and family!

Purchase Information
Price: $95 each (plus shipping, and tax for California residents).
Now available at the discounted price of $54!
To order: write to Sara Dakin at Da_Plastique_Sales@adidam.org.

If you would like to receive your calendars in time for Danavira Mela (December 25), the calendars must be ordered and paid for by Friday, November 18 for international orders, and by Friday, December 2 for domestic orders.

Sample Pages

(click to enlarge)

The 2017 Image-Art Calendar
can now be ordered from DaPlastique.

Return to Celebrations

Quotations from and/or photographs of Avatar Adi Da Samraj used by permission of the copyright owner:
© Copyrighted materials used with the permission of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. None of these materials may be disseminated or otherwise used for any non-personal purpose without the prior agreement of the copyright owner. ADIDAM is a trademark of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as Trustee for the Avataric Samrajya of Adidam.

Technical problems with our site? Let our webmaster know.