Blue Mountain Gallery Opens A SPLASH OF THOUGHTS AND A TOUCH OF COLOR Today

Beginning today, November 25th, the Blue Mountain Gallery will present an exhibition, A Splash of Thoughts and A Touch of Color, featuring a collection of drawings, paintings and lithographs by Alakananda Mukerji, an artist working in various media whose pieces have been featured in both New York and international shows. Mukerji, who holds a professorship at Manhattanville College, currently works out of studios on both sides of the Hudson.

It has been suggested that the word religion is derived from the Latin referring to that which binds us to what is sacred or divine. For Alakananda, line and color are spiritual exercises; they are prayers and temples; they are invitations to see existence in all its holy grandeur. And like a true devotee, the artist spends time each day in contemplation, paintbrush or charcoal in hand, focusing on the infinite potential of a blank canvas.

Like the Ganges of her youth, or the Harlem and Hudson of her adulthood, Mukerji sees her art and herself as a river-a symbol of the transcendent in its ever-changing, changeless flow. Movement, tension, currents, force, these are the fluvial elements of her work - twistings, turnings, peaceful restlessness.

The objects and characters in the artist's compositions are acolytes to the slow and careful revelation of subject - some figurative, others abstract, yet all incarnations of the concepts of form and colors. In both their familiarity and strangeness, they speak of various facets of the human experience: moods and mindsets; cultures, clashing or combining; being and becoming.

Alakananda Mukerji has made many stops along the pilgrimage that has been her life as an artist. This show is an itinerary of her journey, with images informed and inspired by the many devotional stops she has made along the way: the realistic, the baroque, the artisanal, the expressionistic, the impressionistic, the modern, the romantic and the primitive.

You are invited to concelebrate Alakananda's mystery of line and light, and to explore the paths she has trod.