Posts Tagged 'colors'

290. Who needs a subject?

Birdman

I finished it yesterday and wrote a mistaken date, as you can find in the signature. It should be 050418.

I started it in the night that lead to the forth. I came off bed where I did not sleep and sat down to do a drawing.

The colors will come in the day, I thought. This is indeed what happened.

I had a feeling about how I wanted the language of the painting be. It was a pleasant feeling, like a feeling that I used to get when I would be on my way to the swimming pool, already imagining the sensation of water touching my body everywhere.

I want to write about this language.

But first, it seems there is some form that is being depicted in the picture. Maybe it is some sort of a big man with a bird’s head. Whatever it is, it is made of a flimsy structure of moving lines that hold a strange gathering of soft, mostly translucent shapes.

These shapes of colors; what holds them in place? Are they confined? It does not seem so. It looks as if these shapes can move away and be free of the drawing. Some pieces do radiate away.

Do they want to be together? Maybe their behavior has nothing to do with wanting? Maybe this is just what they do when they are in certain circumstances?

All these details are told with the language of the artwork. You can say, maybe, that the language and the story that is being told cannot be separated.

Just like in any language, when the language and what it describes cannot be separated, the whole thing becomes a poem. Or maybe, since this is a visual art piece, maybe we can say that it gives the feeling of something true. If we experience this feeling, we tend to like the painting and usually it is hard, if at all possible for us, to explain why we like it. The whole experience belongs in a different realm than the one we usually describe successfully with a language.

But is this at all possible to describe any experience in a language?

This is why for some of us the language of numbers feels more capable of describing phenomena or experiences. If it is three, then it is three and nothing else. At least we know this. But do we?

Maybe this is good enough for now, for this discussion?

I want to aim the light of our thinking onto the use of the visual language. I think that the language shares more information than the content.

So the lines here seem as if they are not sure where they are going. They try and fail to describe something. But in their failure, a feeling is created that something is there. We are not sure what exactly the lines do. Do they try to describe a shape, or do they describe the quivering of the energies as they move through the form? Is it a living form, because there is energy moving through it?

How does the form feel? Does it want to be there? Is it wondering about itself and its environment?

Is it just trying to be filled with enough being, so it can experience everything around and in it?

And as such, does it matter at all what the form is? It is a wanting to experience. This is enough.

And let’s take the colored forms.

They come together as different units of being, made of what? Maybe too made of wanting to know or wanting to experience? They touch each other and overlap, where they mix with each other. They accompany the quivering curious delineated shape of lines and they interact with it too.

And all the parts, the lines and the shapes, are free in their nature. They don’t have to be there. They have just come together as a strange occurrence, involving all kinds of being, stories and feelings, out of their common curiosity.

Are they focused on the inner world, so to speak, or the outward one? It seems that there is nothing really substantial in their gathering. Nothing is heavily real in both the inner and the outer world that they create. Only deep, rolling, playing interest in what can be made up and be experienced.

But since there is nothing very substantial in that coming together of these suggestive, wondering lines and the friendly mixing together color shapes, then who is experiencing anyway?

You see? All of this is given or shared through the language of this art.

Who needs a subject then?

Well, we need a subject for this coming together and experiencing. But it is never as substantive as we make it to be in our thoughts.

Think about it if you wish, or maybe it will become a poem?

 

289. Encumbered flow

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My mood improved this morning when I gave a name to the painting of yesterday. The name is Encumbered Flow (I wrote this a week ago).

I had a not-so-good feeling about this painting and I thought about different ways to change it by adding more things.

I didn’t.

Maybe I could change the contrast between the brush lines and the squarish shapes of the colors, by painting the background. This would leave the drawing’s flow more clear. But I would loose the truth of the picture. So I left it as it is.

Eliminating the white ‘windows’ inside of the flowing shape was another possibility. It could let the drawing flow better too.

Do you see this?

The white little spaces are like interesting out-of-context things that attract you to them while making the complete flow less important. So the flow feels hesitant.

Maybe it is not important to finish the flowing shape’s rout? This may even be a good thing, when, for example, you walk in a new place and the interest in the local details causes you to not finish the rout that you decided to take.

But a painting is a whole route thing, isn’t it? You have to see all of it if you want to feel the composition. The composition is the most important thing in a painting.

And maybe this is not true any more? A person can choose to live in one interesting place all his life and never visit any other towns or villages, and he can have a fascinating life. In the same way, he can define his own little composition in a part of the painting. It all depends on what interests him and what he wants to do or be or experience.

You see? This is where this painting is coming from. Everything I thought before is being challenged now.

Not that there are right things and wrong things, and my job is to find the right ones. No, there is not even one right thing. There is not even one wrong thing. There is the choice. So I chose to leave the painting as it is. By giving it the name Encumbered Flow I acknowledged what I did not like about it before. Now I like it for being a truthful description. I don’t fight with it any more. I am at peace. And I am free now to start another painting.

272. You have never been anything but this

Flow in the body

I like the painting more when I get very close to it. So close, that I almost don’t see all of it. This is also how I like to paint. The world around the painting disappears and all I have is the lines, the colors, the shapes, the textures. It is an extremely pleasant world for me. Who knows what’s in it? How deep can we go in it? Does it mirror me? These questions come to me now.

Maybe answers will come if we look at the painting and see what we can learn from it.

The lines in red are the energy in my body or maybe better, in my being. I know, because this is what I wanted to draw. The energy goes up, it feels to me, like fire, but not that fast. The energy does not stop. It goes and goes and goes. It is a good feeling, basically, of wellbeing.

Yes, you can detect some hesitation and doubts here and there, by the direction of the lines. But it flows on. This is the life as it comes together from so many shallow and deeper layers of thoughts. Thought after thought and Choice after choice, I determined how this flow of the energy of my now-life will go.

Take a little distance now and see those thoughts, those choices that build the flow.

They look like leaves here, with different emotional charges (colors). And their movement is not so unlike the movement of the energy. They represent all the same directions that appear in the flow of energy. This is expected. In some places the leaves seem to get entangled and almost become a blockage. But once their influences come together in the flow, they seem to move more in agreement.

How can it happen? There must be some other influences. And these are the yellow and orange shapes. Two of them, those with the straight lines, look like big bodies of light, or I can imagine them to be knowledge that is bigger than the stories in the leaves. And we have the rounded orange cloud that also contains that light in it. I won’t escape, I realize, without saying the word love.

And if you look at the general composition you can see that there is a lot of white space in the picture. This makes whatever happens in the picture, all that we talked about before, less significant. The forms may break apart, become brittle and dissipate in the white space. There is drama in the forms but the stronger presence is that of the white, into which all of the dramas may disappear.

And there are the three pencil lines. They seem to be some spontaneous excited declarations, while the more quiet curious shapes and the murmuring energy do their parts.

Now we can go back to the questions I asked in the beginning.

What is in it? It is not a question any more. Or, indeed, it could have been something else.

Does it mirror me? Of course, and probably mirrors every one else, in different variations.

How deep can we go into it?

The thoughts and choices belong to what we did throughout life or lives, so even if we go deeper than we ever thought possible, we will still encounter the same situation in which some kind of believed stories create flows of lives. The possibilities are infinite, and limited at the same time.

If we go into the white, we know it has no end. Every time we go a little or much into the white, we cause a change in our stories and in the flow. Our ’now’ changes. It can become more or less beautiful, more or less heroic, more or less of anything.

The ‘now’ is where our frontier is. This is where we come with all the stories that we have created and the ways that they have interacted and built flows, and with these we face and touch the white. The white can only touched in the now. Maybe we will step a little more into it, and all that we are, will change again.

Now the white laughs and says, between rolls on the ground and back flips: you have never been anything but white.

So what will a painter do?

259. Don’t worry, Mama

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Under the drawing lines there are only two shapes. One is yellow. One is multi colored. The drawing lines above the second, bigger shape, were used as borders among the colors. The drawing and the multi colored shape became glued to each other through this. They became one.

But from the top of the multi color shape, the drawing continued to go out into the world and play.

-Come back, drawing. Time for dinner.

-But it is so much better to play out here. Do you hear, Mama? The yellow shape shouts “Catch me!” But no, I’m not going to hold on to anything. -Shine on, yellow. Be free like me. Don’t worry Mama. We are going to have a good time, all of us. Look: I’ve already made some fruit!

-Oy vey, my child is leaving…

(This was my subconscious.)

248. A second reading

from entry 245

Painting from entry 245

What else can we see in this painting?

The colors in the architectural area on the right side are warm and feel comfortable with each other.

The colors in the man are colder and more contrasting with each other.

Can it be that the man is somewhat conflicted, and maybe feels that he is leaving a comfortable place by being attracted to the unknown?

The man’s interest is somewhere in the left, outside of the painting. But he is seated. We do not see him going to the left. Can it be that he hesitates?

There is a lot of activity in the drawing layer. Can it be that a lot of thinking is going on?

And yet there is in the painting the clarity of seeing what is going on. And when there is that depth of seeing that happens because there is an identification with the flow of intuition, we know that a change will come soon. Seeing from a deeper state, which is what awareness is, releases the shallower layer to start moving. And because the state of awareness is a feeling better state, the next state to appear will adjust itself to the better feeling awareness by being a better feeling state.

You see? This is the power of awareness. This is why awareness is so good for us. Just being aware, or seeing from a deeper layer of ourselves, changes us for the better. Better here means feeling better. Isn’t feeling better better?

238. A story about idealism and reality

I was born in Israel and my parents were idealistic pioneers. They built Israel from nothing, with all the others there of course. They wanted social justice, a place to live and grow their food, a place where they could have a country and a piece of land and they wanted their children to be born in a country with a house and a field. I drank idealism with my mother’s milk. (This was long ago. Now it is a bit more complicated there.)

I was an artist from young age. I went to study graphic design. In Graphic Design you make art that is used immediately. Then I was an illustrator. As an illustrator you illustrate children’s books, for children to grow up with good stories, with knowledge and love of the world about them, with a good taste in art, as it makes for a better life. And you illustrate for adults so that they will think in a different way and they will laugh…

Then I got involved with Buddhist meditation, and the idea was to know what I am, so that I’ll live my true life.

And indeed, once you start to know something you start teaching. What can be more important than helping others know what they are, so that their lives will be good, and truthful? And that they will be good people, help each other and create a wonderful world for all of us, and our offspring…

Then I went to study art therapy, so I would be able to help people get rid of what held them back from being what they were. To show them how to become free of inhibiting ideas and thrive, so that they can live happily and lovingly etc.

And I did all these. I was idealistic and practical.

Then I started to know that every one of us has his own world, created by his own consciousness. We do not live in the same world. Our worlds meet with each other and it looks as if it is one world, but it is not so.

You can’t create a meaningful change in any part of the reality that is around you in your world. If you want this reality to change, you have to change yourself. The new thoughts and beliefs that you will have will bring to you everything that fits this new state of mind. So I cannot change or help change the people who come to do therapy with me. In one view, they are part of my outside world. I have to change myself, and as a result another version of that person will appear in my world, which will be a match to the way I have become. From another view, the patient is in another world, where he is the only one who can make changes in his world, by changing himself.

I always thought that we all lived in the same world. That there was one person in front of me, who suffered, and I helped him release the suffering and live a better life. But no.

And I thought that making art was a good thing for other people, to widen and deepen their experience, to give them the experience of beauty that will help them live a more beautiful life, with love, with collaboration, with understanding…

Now I felt there was no sense in doing anything. I always had a purpose for doing things and I missed it.

It felt like depression.

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Then I decided to ask August Moon about it.

August Moon is my inner guide. I have been connected with him for a while. He always answers. He is always there.

I asked and made a drawing, as I like to get the answers through the art. Sometimes I know through words, but if it is a big thing, I make art and read the answer in it. I just like it this way.

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And as soon as I started making the art, I knew the answer. The lines in the drawing spoke to me with the energy that is in them:

The reason to do anything, to do all that you want to do, is not that there is a need for it. You are not doing it for any idealistic purpose. You do it because it is your nature to be interested in doing things. It is your nature to love. It is your nature to be curious, playful, peaceful, capable and creative. This nature is what you are and it is expressed by what you do. So you do, just because you are a natural expresser of yourself.

So, you see? There is no outside reason for me to be happy. I am happiness.

And how can this be depressed?

 

236.The energy is left with no job

All the colors stand around me, in bottles, tubes and pencils. They are looking quietly at what I do. What will I say? They are my audience now.

I love them. They can do infinite things. They do not really look. I know. It is the whole who looks. The infinite listening-with-the-heart. The heart-of-listening. His name is I.

When the light of seeing is bright and strong, everything that is non-transparent burns into non-existence. Its energy is left with no job. It gives itself back to be used for creation.

The name of the creator is I too.

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It seems the light in the middle of the painting (the yellow and orange) is marred. It has been hit on the head.

Darkness (on the left) makes a threat. But the little child-who-flies is not afraid. He flies into the darkness to repair his past. He will find his love that he rejected in those old times. It is like the soul-retrieval that shamans do.

The goodness and the freedom-filled-joy, which is the lost part of him, will be found where it went to hide when it was not permitted to act in the world. It will be invited back and respected, loved, accepted, joined.

Again the lines tell the stories. The color shapes tell the emotions. The composition says that all is blessed, with all its tiniest details.

The white always looks with endless love and curiosity, with awe, with pride and marvel.

There is confusion there too, on the right, projecting a yes-no feeling.

Everything is okay.

 

The big yellow mother would like to say: Be careful!

But she knows that daring requires love and trust, and not carefulness. So she does not say a word. She admires her child.

#####

Yesterday in the morning I sat on the window seat and meditated. With all the lack of sleep that I collected, because of the pain, I fell asleep. I lost my balance and fell. I opened my eyes in the middle of the fall and saw the world turning around. But I was still asleep when my forehead hit the floor.

Then I woke up.

I felt fear and this conjured up memories from an event in my childhood, that now I saw more fully than before. Doors that were closed before, opened.

Fear cannot come if there is no story behind it. Falling cannot happen without a belief or a few beliefs that invite it. I know this is strange for some.

 

After some time I did this painting.

 

235. Take the inner world out

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There are the lines and there are the color shapes. They seem to describe the same thing but they have very different perspectives.

Sometimes, in other paintings, the lines and the shapes do not necessarily describe the shame thing. If we compare this to music, then those paintings are like counterpoint. The lines have a tune and the color shapes have a different tune. But when they are placed on top of each other, the music makes sense. The music becomes richer by the working together of different tunes.

This painting is more like a tune with chords. The chords accompany the tune that the lines make.

If we look at the lines, trying to see the character of the tune, in my opinion, it is hesitant, even afraid somewhat. It tries to describe something but we cannot identify what it is. In a way it is like what toddlers do sometimes, when they pretend to be writing words and sentences but they don’t yet know how to write. So the lines only looks as if they are describing shapes. There is humor in that.

Now if we look at the color shapes, they don’t seem to be worried at all. They seem to be happy. They come together to share an activity and while playing together they keep their independence and individual identities. They seem to be playful and enjoying the game that they play.

If we describe the music here, it may be something like this: on the background of freely moving pleasant chords, the tune is hesitant. Its parts hold on to each other as if they are afraid to fall apart. There is no sense of freedom in the tune. It seems to be working hard, trying to fulfill some duty or necessity. It is a bit ridiculous in its efforts to describe everything in detail while it is impossible to decipher what it describes.

The chords in this piece of music are strange. They are a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant feelings.

I actually like that kind of music.

But if this were the description of a person, what would you want to tell him?

Maybe it will be, to let go of some of the seriousness with which it takes the story line, and give some attention to the deeper layer of himself, where the playfulness, freedom and maybe even the beauty of life’s experiences can be felt. This layer is so close…

But the story won’t stop. And we are here for the story, aren’t we?

So maybe it is possible to take some of the character of the inner layers of who we are and bring it with us outside, when we create the lines of our stories. Maybe we will then make lines that are a bit freer and happier than before?

233. How the “I” moves to a wider view

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Being tired and in pain I became sad. Pain is a simple thing but living with it creates additional problems. Now all of them weighed on me. I thought: I can’t go on like this any more. I did not even paint yesterday and today.

My friend from Germany called. We started to talk and the phone line went dead.

I pulled a new piece of paper onto the table, dipped the brush into the water and into the first paint that my eyes saw in the watercolor box. It was olive green. This is how I choose the first color.

And then there was the drawing. No time. No pain. Brush, water, paint and the composition, the story with no words. The energy of the truth. Everything is good.

The olive green lines and the white of the paper are the best of friends. It is a holy connection. The lines, strikingly, appearing out of the white. The white does not have inside and outside. It is everywhere. It is all-there-is-everywhere. Even the word everywhere does not fit here. Is the green line real? And my eyes that see it: are they real? And my heart that has just become so full and so delighted, what about it?

(The other colors came later.)

 

Now in a different way:

Pain is part of the illusion of life, together with the body, with time, with good and bad.

The true self cannot have pain. Its essence is joy. Its essence is love and playing and being curious. The true self cannot be affected by the illusion.

For the “I” in the illusion pain is real and hard.

The good thing is that everything is connected. All I need to do is to change the way I focus and switch my identity to the true I.

Instead of focusing on the pain and automatically trying to escape it, to fight it, to prevent it, to change it, Instead of these, I find my curiosity and make the olive green lines. I find my playfulness and play with everything that shows itself. I look for the beauty in everything and find it easily. I look for my joy and it is right there. I am joyful. I look for my love and indeed what else do I have? This is how I start to identify with the true self.

And as I do this, I find that I have forgotten the pain. I don’t even feel it. Or if I do, it is not significant. I am in peace. The vibrations of the pain, the waves that streamed through the legs calm down. My hands that clutched one foot fall down, relaxed. The body rests. The energy of creation flows flawlessly everywhere it has to go. The body heals. The specific thinking processes that hold on to the body and its suffering become weaker. I am not so dependent on the body and the world around it. I witness them and I am free. In my mind I am already walking down to town, where the galleries are. I am going to see an exhibition. Right foot, left foot and I dance.

 

127. The energies in the body and the thoughts that move them

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The intention was to paint the inside of all the shapes in the drawing, And to come out with the colors at the top of the shapes. First let me do the way that each color comes out and up a little bit from its designated area, I said to myself. These are the tricky areas. So let me do them first. But when I finished, it looked good to me just as it was. The strong contrast between the lines inside of the big areas (where the olive green lines are, where the other green lines are, where the red lines are, where the darker red areas are and where the blue lines are) and the white, gave these areas a lot of energy, and together with the way the lines curled and bent, as if they were in the middle of doing something, there was so much life inside if the shapes. I liked it and did not want to change.

So what do I get from this?

For me it feels like the energy of life inside of my body, about to explode. No. Not to explode, but to do something big, to do something loving and beautiful.

I looked at the drawing a day later and I still liked it. So it was time to sign.

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Everything is born out of thought.

My hand is the result of a thought. This is how it started and this is how it is being created again and again every very short time, like the way a movie is being created from some thirty pictures every second, that when shown continuously, look like something that moves naturally.

The thought that creates my hand has become a habit that is activated regularly. Based on another thought, which is the story of my life, images are chosen to create motion that will fit with the story of my life. I don’t know how all of this works, with all the details. If you want to understand it from the perspective of a human being, which is what we are of course, you will have many questions. And after they will be answered there will be so much more questions. The amount of details is beyond measure. We are dealing here with infinity, using our finite mind.

Whatever happened to my feet continues to happen so many times every minute. The minutes that have passed have gone out of my reach. Some people, who have the talent to see through the big consciousness of all of us, may visit these moments and see the process happening again. I think all of us can have (less controllable) access to past events in dreams, and in inner visions, connected to memories.

The habits of thoughts that keep creating the nerve damage and the resulting pain in my feet, started some 70 years ago. Do you think I need to visit that time in order to correct my thoughts and with the change of thought, the disease activity will stop?

But you see, the thoughts and the behavior of my energy, that creates this condition, are not those of seventy years ago. They happen right now, so many times every second. So it is enough to deal with what is here now.

There is still a lot to explore. But I’ll stop here. This is enough for one entry.

 


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The healing process

Entries 1-58 show how I use the method of Intuition Through Art to heal myself from Peripheral Neuropathy.

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