What does it look like?

This is an 8-colour lithograph with hand-painted gold leaf. ‘A Gate in the Heart of Love’ depicts the lower halves of the embracing lovers, who have set aside their lute, paintbrush and the book of mystic law. There is a Sanskrit inscription: ‘om shanti’ (meaning divine peace). The lovers are overseen by a mediating Buddha from behind a blaze of lotus-flamed night lights.

Who, what and where?

It was painted by the artist Roberta Booth (1947-2014). She studied at the Royal College of Art from 1969-72. She gave 35 group and 15 one-woman exhibitions and her work has become highly regarded. She was very interested in philosophy and art and carried out research into this throughout her career, eventually focusing on Shamanism, the nature of consciousness, and sacred art.

She had a deep interest in metaphysics and wrote about the power of colour in evoking memory, aiding transcendence and healing the spirit.

She was not a Buddhist but wanted to explore spirituality, in its widest sense, through art.

Why is it significant to the study of religion?

Roberta Booth’s paintings are concerned with the nature of consciousness and of creating the experience of knowing more than we can see. Her works highlight that there is more to explore than the physical world.  The themes of her paintings and their symbolic content encourage us to experience life’s mysteries, but not necessarily to understand or explain them.

Booth wanted her pictures to affect those who saw them. She said of her pictures: “The imagery of my pictures symbolises the external, inseparable interconnection between the human, the natural and the sacred. I believe that art needs to reclaim its place; to pull itself out of contemporary confusion and become part of life as it is lived every day, and as a means of the individual’s experience. I see art as a way of transforming the everyday into something sacred”.

This may be considered a piece of Buddhist art, with its depiction of the Buddha and lotus flowers, which are associated with purity, spiritual awakening and faithfulness. Another example of the Buddhist influence on her art is The Lotus Flower, painted in 2010

Her work is philosophical and highlights the role of art in making us think about what it is to be human and not just to represent the world around us. The artist Professor Michael Tucker, said of her work in 2008: “whether a matter of alchemy or religion, natural spiritual capacity or artistic intuition, it is a mystery embedded deep in the poetic of these new works by Roberta Booth: some of the most original, and yet trans-personal paintings of recent times”.