Posts Tagged 'composition'

322. Addition to 321

I would like to add something to the previous entry.

In the composition there are two spots that have some uniqueness, some characteristics that are different from everything else in the picture.
These are: the area that looks somewhat like a head with dots inside and the area that represents the pain. Here they are:

These two spots relate to each other in their colors, textures and the feeling of having interruptions in them. I could call it spottiness. Please look at them in the big picture, in the previous entry.
In the head, the spots look like a decoration. In the pain area the feeling is of a bleeding in a weak system.

Because these two spots are the only different places in the painting, they become important, and the relationship between them becomes important too. They become the subject of the art. Usually the subject of a picture is the strongest and biggest element. and here the subject is almost negligible. The two big movements in this painting, this of the lines and that of the color shapes appear to be the strongest and biggest elements. Maybe it will be more correct to say now that the subject of the art is the contradiction between the strong and big elements and the smaller but disturbing elements.

This correctly represents the situation I am in. There is the big movement of opening and connecting more and more to the infinite part of us, and there is the disturbance of the pain.

The pain is related to thoughts that are at the same time beautiful and separated.
Thoughts, beliefs and expectations bring about the experiences that we end up having. Some of the thoughts, the red ones, are connected to the pain by color. If I could let go of these thoughts, maybe this will stop the creation of the pain? And what stands in the way of letting them go? It is the fact that they are considered by me to be beautiful.

Usually we would think that thoughts that create pain must be ugly, shameful, and having other such characteristics. But many of the thoughts that bring us agony are actually being loved by us. This is why we do not want to let them go. Is this true? These thoughts are usually chosen in a very young age, in traumatic circumstances. The child, let’s say the really lovely three years old child, encounters danger. Out of love, and out of wanting to make the situation better, he courageously decides on the spot to act in a way that for him will be the best solution. He feels that it will be a sacrifice. He will have to let go of something that is enthusiastically loved by him. But he is determined to do good, and save the moment. It is beautiful. He is a hero. But this choice of his leads to blocking his connection to his flowing happiness and this creates all kinds of suffering, including, in time, physical suffering.

What do you think?

289. Encumbered flow

FullSizeRender 5

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.

284. Narrow and wide points of view

fear first

Fear.

This is the subject of this painting.

You can see that it is dark. The lines quiver and are afraid to move. Trying to come together and collaborate, they can’t. Fear is like a cloud that covers the open sky of possibilities and free choice. No, you can’t do this, fear says, and you get constricted. You don’t see farther than your immediate confrontation with the thing that frightens you. It seems there is no way to avoid or escape it. It is hard to see anything anyway. This is a very narrow point of view.

Naturally, the relief from fear happens when somehow you manage to open the sky of more possibilities again. How about infinite possibilities?

Within our system of who we are, there is the open sky viewpoint, already a part of us that never leaves. All we have to do is enter the state in which we can experiece this openness. Making art is one of the best ways. (Meditating, Dancing, singing, remembering what you are thankful for, these are some of the other ways.)

So imagine: Something triggered your fear. Perhaps you started to uproot a belief that you had held for a long time, and used to think that it was very important for your safety. Now you start to see how this belief stops you from flourishing and you want to change the situation. The subconscious refuses to change, and suddenly you are afraid. It is as if you think very quickly: What am I doing? I am taking away my protection! A dark cloud covers your open view. There is nobody there to help and it is you against your fear. What to do?

Draw or paint the fear, if you like drawing or painting. Where do you feel the fear? How does it feel? How can you describe in visual effects the way you feel? Ask your intuition to paint for you. Be the hands and eyes of intuition. Whatever ideas come, do them. After all it is just a drawing.

As you paint, you pay attention to how you feel. And you can detect where in the painting your description is true to your experience and where it is not exact enough. So you correct yourself to make a good description, as only you, looking from inside of yourself can know.

From being totally engaged in a confrontation and a fight for life, you change your state to being curious, playing with effects that you invent as you go, and trying out expressions. You pay attention to what feels true and not. Inevitably you start feeling good as there is joy in following your intuition. You start paying attention to the composition, which indeed is a wider view of everything, and without any effort, you are already in a deeper state, a calmer state, a wiser state, a loving state.

Fear cannot stay in such an environment. Fear is the vibration of being cornered by danger. It cannot keep its strength inside of a loving, playful, and curious environment.

And while you are still in this loving state, which is your true nature, ask yourself: What do I really want to do now? What does my true nature want to do?

283. There, not there

The surprising power of green

There are two paintings in this entry.

The first gives a good feeling. All the shapes feel good with each other. They are very close together and whatever happens in the picture, they all take part in it.  But when I was painting, I knew that the big brown roundish shape in the middle of the lower half was a wooden wheel of a mill at the river, and I knew that in the water there was blood. In the painting it is violet. These belong to a traumatic event, not in this life, but I know about it.

So we have a trauma hinted at, but the context is like a quiet, friendly village, where the houses hold each other as they watch the bridge crossing the water. There are trees and the sky is playful.

In the second painting the shapes seem to be in shock. There is a house. There is a line in the middle that could represent a little bridge. There are trees, grass and sky. But the sky seems to be torn. Maybe there is a scream in the sky. A dry, dead branch, is pointing at the scream. And there are these warm colored shapes, orange, red and brown, colors that do not really belong in this landscape. They are in the painting to describe something traumatic that is just happening.

The composition isn’t settled. Everything is moving from its place. Where will the pieces fall? We do not know yet.

An event from childhood

Then, for a lifetime, the trauma that we had will be expressed in everything that we think and do.

Sometimes it will be hard to find, like in the first painting. In other times it will be strong and inescapable. Until we decide one day to let it go and we find a way to work on it till it is not there any more.

 

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?

245.From dense to airy

p1000377

I’m reading this picture, based on its composition. This will be a preliminary reading. I’ll point out a few obvious things and see what I can gather from this. It is possible to read much more in the picture, and maybe I’ll do this in the next entry.

It has two layers, as many of my paintings lately. The drawing layer has three areas. The right side has many architectural shapes. It is organized in mostly perpendicular and horizontal directions, with a few diagonals, that you can find in architecture too.

The left side has shapes that are more organic. The shapes are free from the straight angles of the right side and they grow into each other. The third area is where there is no drawing, or only little short lines that seem to float in space. That’s where there is less density and more freedom.

The pencil lines, those that define the colored areas, go on top of the watercolor lines. In this way they create some confusion, because the colors inside of the pencil lines are all underneath the ochre lines of the drawing. This contradictory message creates a strong connection of the background shapes and the drawing, indicating that the two layers are very close to each other and depend on each other to tell the story of the picture. And it is hard to decide what is more important or primary.

The color shapes in the right side go along with the feeling of architecture or a city. The color shapes on the left go along with the feeling of an organic shape, something that is alive and moving. It is like a person in a sitting position. His two hands are extended to the far left, and it seems that he is doing something outside of the picture.

And there is indeed space around the person and the part of the city that we see. Some smaller shapes float there, breaking the density of the city and the man and giving the picture some places with less tension to rest in.

So the focus of the man is in the more spacious area. That’s what he is interested in.

Basically we have a transition from an area that is densely full of visual events, through more relaxed shapes, that break the straight lines rule, to the beginning of space, into which the smaller pieces of the reality that’s on the right are falling or spreading.

In a shorter way, the picture shows the shift from eventful and intense reality to more peacefulness and freedom.

This is an experience of the now-life that we can read in the basic features of the composition.

If I ask myself where would I want to be, in this picture, the answer is “In all three places.”

I’d like to experience the peace that is outside of the objects, I’d like to experience the richness of the city, and I’d like to experience my body, alive and feeling.

And as I have all three of them at the same time, I can say that I am fulfilled. In this fulfillment there is peace too, till the next interest will catch me.

Isn’t this amazing that from so little you can say so much already?

I do not know what name to give this new chapter. Everything is different for me, and the same. I decide to let the chapter grow and deserve a name, and then it will have it.

219. The mirror spoke

Conflicted about direction

Which way to go?

Did a drawing this morning. This morning was a slow one. I woke up at four, drank tea with milk and stayed in bed, sitting with the backing of the couch’s pillow, and the meditation cushion supporting my head. I listened to Rupert Spira talking for a few minutes about how, after awakening, the allure of material, things, disappears. Then it was close to seven and I did everything of the mornings and ate. And here, at this table, I laid my head on my hands and rested again. It is amazing to me how tired I can be, that even after a good night sleep, which I did not have for so many years, I can be so tired still.

Now I have the new watercolor drawing in front of me and I think: Let’s see what is in it.

I can see density, as if it describes stones or packages that somehow got connected to each other in groups. Now we have a few clumps. The way the clumps relate to each other as a group of clumps, as a composition, gives a feeling of an effort. What is the effort? Maybe it is to stay together, while every one of them wants to go somewhere else. This is where the tension comes from.

There is one unfinished piece and it gives the effect of something that was left undone, unfinished. And maybe this effect creates another one, of something that happened in a haste. This whole group of clumps detached itself, or even better, tore itself away from something bigger and found itself free, but conflicted about where to go now. Now that they have freedom, what do they want to do with it?

And before, when I looked at the drawing and did not yet let the words come and tell me this story, the drawing looked like a stranger. How did it come here? What does it have to do with me?

And here we are now. The mirror spoke at last.

217. A slight movement of an eyebrow

What is hiding in the forms?

The tilted, hidden story

At first I thought this was going to be a boring drawing with no emotions, no story and nothing happens. As I worked on it, it felt almost like a drawing that came from thinking.

But it didn’t. I find it interesting now. It has a story. The story is whispered. Boiled down to the essence, the story is about real, beautiful, sweet and loving life, hidden in forms. The forms would seem to limit the life, but they can’t. Everything sings. It dances in the air, like the people and cows in paintings by Chagall. It whispers slight differences of colors and shapes. It completes itself as a composition, which is an expression of non-physical relations, involvements and collaborations. It could be called: The hidden joy of inner music.

If it were a person, it would just stand there, well dressed and quiet. But you would notice a very slight movement of an eyebrow and you’ll understand everything.


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

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