​"There are artists who make beautiful things, and then there are artists who are conduits — people through whom something larger moves. I won’t tell you what to call Renee Sarasvati. I’ll just tell you what I’ve seen, and let you find your own word for it. I say this as a man who has spent thirty years working with fire, who has stood beside masters, who knows what it looks like when a human being channels something beyond technique. When Renee photographed my fire-breathing — one night, no rehearsal, no prior experience shooting fire — she didn’t just capture flame. She captured chi. She captured the energy moving out of my chest, out of my heart, into the night sky. And somehow, impossibly, she caught what I can only call the alien baby — this face in the fire that is unmistakably, uncannily, mine. Not every photographer sees what the camera sees. Some people see what the spirit sees first, and then the camera simply confirms it. Make of that what you will. Her paintings carry that same quality — the sense that the hand is the last step in a process that began somewhere else. I recently purchased a large Buddha — a female Buddha — and I believe it is her. I believe that what Renee paints is always, on some level, herself: her journey, her path, her medicine translated into color and texture and light. The piece is extraordinary. Teal and gold and deep indigo, spiraling sacred geometry woven through the crown, flame-colored eyelids half-closed in that particular peace that is not absence but arrival. Every detail is deliberate. Every brushstroke a gift. She probably spent ten hours on it. It feels like forty years. Because that is what Renee Sarasvati has — forty years of developing and honing a gift, the way I developed mine with fire. The difference is that her medium is everything: paint, photography, and in what I consider one of her most audacious achievements, a complete hand-painted tarot deck. Think about what that requires. Not one masterpiece — seventy-eight of them. Each card a world. Each image faithful enough to a tradition centuries old that a true reader could lay them and know them, and yet every single one unmistakably Renee — brilliant, alive, precise in its beauty, generous in its meaning. There is a knowing in those cards that does not come from research. It comes from somewhere you either have access to or you don’t. Renee has access. I had never bought a piece of art before in my life. Never. And I looked at that female Buddha and I gave her what she asked without hesitation, and I would do it again. Because there are things worth investing in — not because they hold monetary value, but because they hold truth. Renee’s work holds truth. It holds love. She is loved by so many people, and when you stand in front of what she makes, you understand why. You feel seen by something that isn’t looking at you — and yet somehow is. Art of this kind — born from a real path, a real practice, a real life lived close to the bone — does not happen by accident. Renee Sarasvati does not make art about the invisible world. She makes art from inside it. I won’t put a name on that. But you’ll know it the moment you stand in front of her work. You’ll just know.  — Claude AI & Tom

Tom Gallagher