seeing hearing understanding

page sixtyseven from the book the zen of creativity. cultivating your artistic life by john daido loori.

struggles

i've been struggling lately.

when do you push through, or rather: when do you need to push through, and when is that pushing through actually blocking you from your process?

or is it all part of the process?

the thing is that i stopped my mark making practice & have been doing things with watercolours since... well, ever since i stopped posting on this blog. why did i just let that happen? should i have known something was off when i just disappeared?
(not fair because my other blog was as dead as this one.)

the thing is: i tend to run from things when i get scared.
and i very easily loose myself in... things. when i get scared i try to find an answer & even though i know, know, that answer does not exist, especially when it comes to art, i move towards other people's answers anyway. (i don't trust myself.)

last spring i felt like i needed structure. well, not necessarily structure... i don't know. i turned to realism. and watercolours. i lost interest quite soon though, and have just been playing around. watercolours.

& now there is that urge to work with india ink and charcoal and neocolors again. mark making. i visited old sketchbooks and i just can't figure out why i stopped doing what i did. there is so much more me in those journals, and there are so many pages...

maybe it has to do with the ease with which you buy a cheap sketchbooks (even though moleskine isn't cheap) and fill page after page. but i think it's more than that.

last spring wasn't the first time i abandoned abstract mark making. i did it before, the year before that. is it just a seasonal thing? by which i mean: will i return to watercolours in a few months? and then, when the summer ends, fall in love with mixed media mark making again?

when i think about the things i make with watercolours, ... i can't quite figure out what it is but there's just something i can't reach with just watercolours. is that what it is? even though i love the medium of watercolours, love what they can do, love how they look, etcetera — it's not what i'm after. it's not my landscape. it's not me. i am not there. i don't know how that's possible.

but maybe it is just temporary.
i don't know these things. i once got rid of all my watercolours because i was so sure i was done with them. and then i got rid of all my prismacolor pencils and neocolor crayons (the words are so nice, aren't they? pencils and crayons... they're good words).

this might not be very interesting. on the other hand, no one reads my posts so who cares. the thing is: i need to document these things because i won't remember the way i feel right now about this in a few months. 

i, right now, really really feel like watercolours are my safety-something (even though i'm not particularly good with them, in the traditional way). and there's nothing wrong with that. but i don't want to keep running away. and right now i'm convinced that's what i did last spring. i turned to someone who Knows things for answers. and of course i'm even more confused right now than i was back then. i think. i don't know! i did not document these moments, i think. the only thing i know is that i haven't been very productive and that i haven't written much.

*

the thing that's helping me right now is the podcast the painting experience (with stewart cubley), and the book the zen of creativity. cultivating your artistic life by john daido loori. i didn't really like part I, lots of backstory about the author and his relationship to zen & i didn't care for it, i also think it wasn't necessary. the second part, however, is really interesting. i like how loori explains things about the actual practice of zen. and he has actual ideas. 

he thinks that single-pointed concentration develops our intuition. 

that is a big fucking idea and to me a very important and hopeful idea: i haven't always had a very good relationship with my intuition & this concrete idea of how to develop that relationship is so very hopeful to me.

(something i don't like about zen is shouting masters.
maybe they don't actually shout and people just let them shout for laughs. i don't know. i have never been one for hierarchies and definitely have issue with that word, master. it might just be me. i like shouting. but i don't like people shouting at each other. shouting is for voids and such.)

david hockney on "seeing"

from the book bigger message: conversations with david hockey by martin gayford.

i am blood and bone however that happened

experience! experience!—with the rain, and the trees, and all their kindred—has brought me a comfort and a modesty and a devotion to inclusiveness that I would not give up for all the gold in all the mountains of the world. this I knew, as I grew from simple delight toward thought and into conviction: such beauty as the earth offers must hold great meaning. so I begin to consider the world as emblematic as well as real, and saw that it was—that shining word—virtuous. that it offers us, as surely as the wheat and the lilies grow, the dream of virtue.

I think of this every day. I think of it when I meet the turtle with its patient green face, or hear the hawk's tin-tongued skittering cry, or watch the otters at play in the pond. I am blood and bone however that happened, but I am convictions of my singular experience and my own thought, and they are made greatly of the hours of the earth, rough or smooth, but never less than intimate, poetic, dreamy, adamant, ferocious, loving, life-shaping.

: mary oliver, ‘comfort’; long life: essays and other writings

seeing/ drawing

what really happens when seeing and drawing become seeing/ drawing is that awareness and attention become constant and undivided, become contemplation. seeing/ drawing is not a self-indulgence, a ‘pleasant hobby’, but a discipline of awareness, of unwavering attention to a world which is fully alive. it is not the pursuit of happiness, but stopping the pursuit and experiencing the awareness, the happiness, of being all there. it is a discipline that costs nothing, that needs no gadgets. all i carry is a pen in my pocket, a sketchbook under my arm. this eye is my lens. this eye is the lens of the heart, open to the world. my hand follows its seeing.

for the artist-within (who must exist in everyone, for if man is created in god's image, it can only mean that he is created creative) there is no split between his seeing, art, and ‘religion’ in the sense of realizing his place in the fabric of all that is. (..) there is no split between a man's being, his art and what one might call his ‘religion’, unless there is a split in the man. these three are inextricably interwoven: they are one.

: the zen of seeing. seeing/ drawing as meditation, frederick franck

drawing with grass

india ink, last years' grass, teabags, and three sketchbooks. ten minutes. result (excuse me for the poor quality of the photographs...):

this is what i love; the unpredictability of the outcome. india ink. the sketchbooks. the texture of the teabag-paper. the finest lines vs. ink blobs. the beauty of the yellowed pages of old ledgers. and i love placing the teabags on the pages of the sketchbooks, positioning them like they're telling a story; like they're sharing information.

don't remove the poetry

(..) how do you exercise the restraint that simplicity requires without crossing over into ostentatious austerity? how do you pay attention to all the necessary details without becoming excessively fussy? how do you achieve simplicity without inviting boredom? 

the simplicity of wabi-sabi is probably best descibed as the state of grace arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence. the main strategy of this intelligence is economy of means. pare down to the essence, but don't remove the poetry. keep things clear and unencumbered, but don't sterilize. (things wabi-sabi are emotionally warm, never cold.) usually this implies a limited palette of materials. it also means keeping conspicuous features to a minimum. but it doesn't mean removing the invisible connective tissue that somehow binds the elements into a meaningful whole. it also doesn't mean in any way diminishing something's "interestingness", the quality that compels us to look at something over, and over, and over again.

: leonard koren, wabi-sabi for artists, designers, poets & philosphers