About this work
A spare female figure leans against the wooden railing of a verandah, the mountains of British Columbia's North Shore rising in the background. The composition presents a brooding attitude and an otherworldly palette — flesh rendered in colours no human skin has ever literally worn. That chromatic transgression is the point. Varley pushes the figure into the same spectral register as the landscape behind her, dissolving the boundary between person and place. The result is less a portrait than a vision: a human form caught in a moment of stillness so complete it has begun to merge with the world around it. The title is the Hindu term for a state of meditation in which the mind looks into the soul — and indeed the painted figure is serene, beguiled by the swirling nature around her glowing form.
Varley broke through styles and conventions with 1932's *Dharana*.
He had spent the years since 1926 in Vancouver, teaching and painting, and one of his students, Vera Olivia Weatherbie, had become both his lover and muse.
He described the title as "a Hindu term" that "describes a state of meditation in which the mind looks into the soul," and Weatherbie herself had taught him about auras — "vibrations which surround all people revealing the true state of their emotions and spirit."
The painting is now held in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario , and Varley considered his time in Lynn Valley in the early 1930s "the most creative period of his career."
*Dharana* depicts Vera Weatherbie in a state of ecstatic communion with nature — and it captures Varley at his most characteristic: always answering the grandeur of the B.C. landscape with an inward, brooding, and deeply psychological painterly response.
On a wall, *Dharana* holds the temperature of a room down. It wants natural light — the kind that shifts through the day — and enough wall space to breathe. It suits a room that values quiet intensity over decoration: a study, a reading corner, a bedroom that takes art seriously. The viewer it speaks to is someone drawn to the figure not as subject but as presence — to the idea that a painting can hold the interior life of another person. Varley experimented with colour and form rather than relying on the subdued palette of his contemporaries, and explored a metaphysical layer and symbolism that set his work apart. *Dharana* is that ambition made visible: a portrait that has outgrown portraiture.
