Susan Campbell,
A Friend at Merion Friends (Quaker) Meeting
Merion, Pennsylvania, USA
© 2002

Isaac Falconer/Saku Gunasegaram was born a child of a Christian Tamil family in Sri Lanka where she lived in the midst of severe, violent social and political unrest. She immigrated legally with her family to the United States at the age of 18.  Her education included postgraduate work in psychology at Princeton University and at The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. A young woman of deep human compassion, she chose to care for persons profoundly afflicted with cerebral injuries in a small residential hospital. There she alleviated suffering through her uncanny, or rather God-given intuitive mastery of the human brain. The death from breast cancer other most dear grandmother, deepest friend and spiritual guide, propelled the young woman into cancer research at the Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Yet all the while Saku Gunasegaram immersed her time and considerable talent in science, Isaac Falconer devoted herself to writing poetry and painting at home.
 

By grace, her subsequent immersion in Quaker worship, lives, and thought, with its affirmation of the Spirit of Christ within all persons, coupled with experience of living Spiritual Friendships at Merion Friends Meeting, enabled her to release her life to obedience to the Holy Spirit. Thus followed the integration other being and the joyful, open, welcoming embrace of the creative center, hitherto hidden as 'forbidden fruit'.
 

Such an experience might find its metaphor in The Navel of a Sunny Afternoon. The brilliant living orange fruit pulsates amid ever-changing shades of yellow light. The rice paper’s rich texture imbues the oil pastel fruit with incredible verisimilitude of oranges in nature, while the yellow background, with its purposeful folds, replicates the actual experience of the quality of modulating light during a walk in the sun. Following the lines of the folds and the line from the center of the lemon on the top left to their imaginary apex, we apprehend the invisible uplifting source of the light. The painted surface is edged by unpainted rice paper, with only some incursions of colour, thus linking this moment to time beyond our imprint. The brilliant beauty is an ode to the richness and fullness of Life in the Spirit.
 

The artist became led to share the fruits other 'whole' life in the spirit of the widow who broke her alabaster box of sweet emollient to anoint the body of Jesus. While persons present chastised the woman for wasting the precious substance rather than selling it to feed the poor, Jesus rebuked them and defended the woman for her loving ministry unto him.
 

The call to such ministry was declared and foretold by the Prophet Isaiah. The Spirit of the Lord God in upon me; because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;...to comfort all that mourn; to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified. Isaiah 61:1-3
 

In such a Spirit the artist wended her way to Venice, Italy to dwell in that place where for centuries such integration of being and beauty has flourished as naturally as the water, light, and air. In such a Spirit she created these paintings. In such a Spirit she welcomes you to her showing.
 

Immediately the viewer will notice the particular radiance of Five Coloured Thoughts. The unique, ever-present play of the qualities of light and water in each painting communicates a message that taps feelingly into the navel of the viewer's creative center like a flowing, living lifeline to the Source of all creation. What insight or genius induces Falconer/Gunasegaram to choose rice paper for her work, each piece of differing and particular density, every fiber uniquely waiting to receive her liquid touch? How appropriate that our thoughts are led to distant and present places, ancient and extant watery rice fields, intimations of the eternal and the temporal. Are they not One?
 

In Choosing Life* is felt and seen reflection of the artist's unified being—and ours. From science is the knowledge of ginkgo leaves, fossilized evidence of the ginkgo tree's presence reaching back a multitude of millennia. From experience is the apprehension of the ginkgo flourishing today, a golden inspiration to endure, a radiant mandate to preserve. But observe the painting—the blinding ebullient liquid golden image of the primordial ginkgo leaf. Its watery impression melts from it intimating its capacity to replicate throughout that white living, flowing rice paper eternity, punctuated only by a small clear well of living water. Now I see face to face in ecstasy what hitherto was only crudely chalked on me professor's blackboard: Plato's Eternal Form of a Ginkgo Leaf in all its mystical veracity. With this painting are we not invited to wave aloft the Flag of Eternity?
 

In Ginkgo at Penn/Ginkgo on Viale S. Marco the artist records encountering further ginkgo emanations at the University of Pennsylvania and in Venice by her dwelling. Touched by the primordial generative gold at the upper left comer, a quietly undulating yellow water lily leaf floating on white rice paper eternity holds the fading fluted fan-shaped ginkgo leaf. Though an edge of the lily leaf submerges toward deeper (living) waters, or shadow touches, a message speaks a Remembrance in this moment, “See Beauty; Take Comfort; Love.”
 

And another leaf, celestial blue, in process of creation, emerges foretelling burgeoning love and unity: The Spirit of a New Leaf. Painted here transparently, mere translucently, on exceedingly thin rice paper, the leaf seems to be at once unearthly of water and the sky. Nevertheless, clusters of dark opaque pools give evidence of the Source of the leaf in the deepest primordial waters of our being. Simultaneously, a sense of ancient Chinese painting is evoked by a deep misty blue burgeoning form: is that a benign Celestial Dragon Sage whose clusters of dark generative eyes know eternity? Barely formed, the leaf image is graced by a splash of stunning silver, with underlying watery green and blue, and comely cascades of miniature silvery leaf shapes. Surely, this glorious silver white light is the pure Spirit of Christ baptizing the leaf in its nascence.
 

Two Fish Come to Light captivates us in its ecstasy. Paradoxically, while exaltingly presenting a still moment in time, it is filled with eternal motion on an atomic level conveyed by the changing blue, yellow, and green colours and outlining gold paint upon the densely textured rice paper. These ancient fish have come from me deep, motherly waters of their origin toward the light -filled surface water and leapt into union in choreographed grace toward the sun, which embraces them in its light What has enabled this miracle? To be sure, miracles abound. In Genesis Sarah and Abraham experienced miracles. She 'laughed' in ecstasy when Messengers conveyed the impossible news that she would bear a son (Isaac) in her old age. And Abraham—imagine his leap of heart when God averted me sacrifice of this same miraculous son-the act he thought' the Lord required of him!
 

And today? Might we hear what the Lord is in the process of revealing to us - we who are oh so slow to believe in miracles? And might we own our freedom to affirm our primordial filial connection with all humanity and creation and, by virtue of the living Holy Spirit, choose Wholeness and Oneness in the Light?
 

*The artist had read Therefore Choose Life by John Tallmadge, a Pendle Hill Publication, Wallingford, Pennsylvania, USA, 1991. The pamplet has a single gold ginkgo leaf on its cover.