The Paintings of Abdullah Dougan
After writing his first book, in 1970 Abdullah turned to painting to help teach his own and others’ ideas and to show objectively man and his place in the universe.
Abdullah believed the most important factor in art to be the content, the message, which is contained in the form. Objective art must have a definite system and his was based primarily on his scale of colour and use of the spiral - one of the basic forms used in our galaxy. The 168 full colour images, presented with notes on the concepts portrayed, span the seventeen years Abdullah painted.
380 pages Hardcover 230 x 230mm, 168 full colour images
ISBN 978-0-476-00589-1 — $NZ 110.00 + p&p
Colours - Click for more information on the individual colours Abdullah used in his paintings.
Click here to view the painting ‘Prayer’ - From the series The Search
Click here to view the painting ‘Love’ - From the series Christian Religion
In 1974 Abdullah wrote a book, Probings, on the ideas of G.I.Gurdjieff, Hazrat Inayat Khan and other Sufis. In 1970 this had not been published, but several people who had read the manuscript asked him to elucidate further, so midway through the year he decided to try to illustrate these ideas by painting.
Abdullah does not intend to explain in words everything depicted in each painting, but rather to give a guide to a realisation of what is being taught. Mr Gurdjieff’s conditioning was to make everything hard to find, as anyone who has read “All and Everything” knows, and this is quite a valid way to teach. Inayat Khan, an Indian Sufi, also kept plenty back, but he was much straighter than Gurdjieff and his books are much easier to read. Abdullahs intention was to try to reconcile these two attitudes.
GURDJIEFF, G. I. (1877?–1949), Georgii Ivanovich Gurdzhiev; Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher who remains an enigmatic figure and an increasingly influential force in the contemporary landscape of new religious and psychological teachings. Resembling more the figure of a Zen patriarch or a Socrates than the familiar image of a Christian mystic, Gurdjieff was considered by those who knew him simply as an incomparable “awakener” of men. He brought to the West a comprehensive model of esoteric knowledge and left behind him a school embodying a specific methodology for the development of consciousness. 
Hazrat Inayat Khan was born into a noble Muslim Indian family (his mother was a descendant of the uncle of Tipu Sultan, the famous eighteenth century ruler of Mysore). He was initiated into the Suhrawardiyya, Qadiriyya and Naqshbandi orders of Sufism but his primary initiation was from Shaykh Muhammed Abu Hashim Madani into the Nizamiyya sub-branch of the Chishti Order. He was also indebted to the philosophical Vedanta/Shankara spirituality of Hinduism.
