Nanda Devi #2, 1979
- Medium
- Oil enamel on canvas
- Dimensions
- 96 x 78 1/4 x 2 in. (243.84 x 198.76 x 5.08 cm)
- Accession Number
- 2011.184
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Purchase with funds provided by Pamela West and a gift of the Estate of Joan Brown, Noel Neri and Michael Hebel, and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco
Brown’s landscape painting hovers between representation and abstraction. The subject is Nanda Devi, India’s second-highest mountain and a sacred site in Hinduism, which the artist has rendered in an ethereal manner, with glowing peaks and valleys. The work may also be understood as an interior or spiritual landscape. Brown created multiple paintings of the mountain, whose name means “bliss-giving goddess,” as an exercise in extreme mental focus in advance of a trip to India and in connection with her study under Paramahansa
Yogananda, a yoga master focused on self-realization. At this time in her life, Brown approached the act of painting as a personal quest to awaken a divine consciousness within herself.