Healing and growth through intuitive art
With all his knots
he found himself flying
above the landscape
He was a line who wanted to flow in curves
he was a thought that wanted to open up
to thoughtlessness
Then, a feeling in the middle of the body
turned into a mountain range
with trees
And emptiness
as it has always done
held its breath.
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?
There are many ways to read art. This is one of them: Just start writing and see where it takes you.
You can also say: Start to describe what you see. From there you start to be guided by your interests, associations, and yes, the universe supports you, based on your inclination at the time. We are always supported.
The painting is from June 5th and I wrote this on June 6th. Other things came in the way and I did them, but now I want to share this.
The first thing that came to my mind was that it came out alive. It means that the power that was used in order to create it is still in it. And what is the power? It is a thought, expressed in space and time.
When you look at it, your energy field responds to the experience by arranging itself into an energy structure. To you it feels like a feeling that you may have a name for. Then your thought processes become engaged and a new adventure starts in your story of your life. It may be big or small. Maybe you immediately turn away, smile, have a cup of tea and look at birds in the sky?
Here is what I wrote:
It feels like this: a number of shapes in different colors bump into each other in the middle (These are the colored shapes). The feeling is of an argument or at least a disagreement (Purple, orange, brown and blue). But it does not come to fighting.
There are three shapes who are out of the group. They haven’t come into touching relations, like the four others. So maybe they hesitate to join? Maybe the yellow on the left and the pink on upper left were kicked out of this society or could not join in as there was not even the slightest invitation extended to them. Or, maybe they stopped before they came too close, so that they can take a good look at what is happening. Maybe they want to check it out before they join? And the cloud, the third of the outsiders, is the one who cares the least. He seems to have more power than all the rest. He has his own behavior and his own field of reference, which is the weather system in the area and the world. As such he is much less a participant in the meeting. But because of him, the perspective of other, bigger systems, is added to every part of this picture.
Then there is the earth with an orange border. But this element is cut abruptly on the left, without too much drama.
This tear-off breaks the impression of a stable earth. This earth can shrink to nothing. Don’t rely on me, it says. Look somewhere else for your stability.
Now the purple and the brown seem to connect with the earth, in spite of it being ephemeral. The orange and the blue seem to be okay with just floating in the air. Or maybe they are not so okay with it, and this is why they come to mix with the earthlings.
So here is a kind of a summary. There is a little drama here. Like in a country, or any society. People collaborate without agreeing with each other. There are some small areas of overlapping and you can say, some form of compromise and collaboration. The others are in differing degrees of separation, deciding not to get involved. But they are close anyway. They are human too and they don’t want to give up on their belonging to this group.
These are the energy bodies, operating by the hidden assumptions that bring about what seems to appear in reality, which is the drawing in green lines.
The green lines describe little separate forms that together create the pattern of what appear in this world of time and space.
So when you wander in this world and see all these forms around you, know that they come from a deeper, usually unseen, layer of energy bodies, coming into being from thoughts and ideas.
All comes from thoughts.
As in a known Zen story, in which some students, looking at a flag that moved in the wind, argued about what truly moved. Is it the flag? Is it the wind? And the master said: Nothing moves, except for your thoughts.
And how could I forget the red part of the lines, in a little area in the right? There was some drama in the reality of the picture.
This red part is indeed a part of the reality that I created with my thoughts. But I gave it the red color to say that according to my beliefs this is a violation of some sort.
Now imagine that you are an art therapist and this is the first artwork that your new client made. Do you see how much can be learned from just the first painting?
And if every one of us has a such a collection of thoughts with him at every moment, can you see what the fabric of our humanity is made of? If we want to have any measure of freedom, we must come out of this state, in which we are controlled by our assumptions, and look at it from a deeper perspective.
intuitiveflow 