Saturday, July 21, 2012

The Wisdom of the Gut

You wouldn't think a meditation cd could have the opposite effect to which it was intended but that's exactly what happened with a cd which was given to me by a friend.  I tried listening to it a week or so ago and found, despite good instructions and good intentions, that I could not sit still.  Why was I so agitated?  Put it down to just one of those things, one of those days and thought no more about it.  Except that every time I thought about the cd there was this tinge of agitation, this reluctance.   Not the usual response to meditation cds.  I've got a couple and have listened to them without anything other than a calm receptivity to what they have to say.  But I was being silly, wasn't I?  This friend was so impressed with this cd that she made sure I had a copy.  She glowed with enthusiasm.  It had to be good.  I respect this friend and her intelligence.  So yesterday I put it on and clicked through to where I'd left off.  And there it was again.  Agitation.   A visceral antipathy.

Why did this man's voice affect me so?  If you must know, it's Barry Long.  He's long dead so anything I write won't hurt his feelings.  And I am in the minority.  Googled him and found he had/has quite a following, that he'd studied in India, was influenced by Krishanmurti and Gurdjieff but maintained that his teachings were his own.  The rest of his life, he died in 2003 from prostrate cancer, was devoted to disemination of his teachings. 

But I have known men like him.  Autocratic.  A magnet for women (and he had 5 long term monogamous relationships during his life).  How can I say I know him when I've listened to one cd and never met the man?  I don't know except that the sound of his voice and the things he said set up a roiling in my gut and, in my book, the gut knows. 

I was hauling myself over the coals for being such a ninny until I looked up his life story.  Five women.  Uh huh.  Prostate cancer (this may be unfair but I do suspect that illnesses manifest in the body where we are conflicted or where negative feelings and memories are stored).  Plus a large part of his teachings, according to Wikipedia, had to do with sex and love in relationships.  Clanging bells and sirens!  So going out on a limb here and judging where I have no right to, I suspect this guy had a magnetic personality, that women were drawn to him, that he was wise yet he couldn't help but use his wisdom for self-aggrandizement, not in money or even, in an overt way, power, but in his need for women, their admiration and sex.

Or maybe I'm just not evolved enough. 

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Artistic Temperament Temperamental

I'm starting to feel like an artist.  Isn't that odd?   And wonderful?  I've been making art in some form for most of my life yet it is only recently that colours and forms and visions are starting to permeate my imagination and my dreams.  And my meditations.  Colours like sky blue and tan which doesn't sound exciting now but made such a rich tapestry in my imagination.  Another time it was a storm coloured sea of black greens and livid sulphurous yellow streaked with aqua that filled that infinite space between my ears.  Paintings are everywhere.  Driving home from yoga and there was another one; the pale ghostly fingers of gum trees diminishing in the gathering darkness of an infinite road dotted with amber reflectors.  It was such a lonely sight.  Could I paint it?  No.  I have never matched the work to the imagination. 

In my last post I wrote about the clarity and artistic vision of children, something I would like to emulate and now I only want to become a better techinician.  What I see and what I reproduce are two entirely different critters.  Have fixative sprayed the last work, the Suspended Man.  I'll do some re-highlighting, a little touching up but for the most part it is finished.  And how far from what I saw in my mind's eye it is.  That is because I still don't have the technical skills.   However I don't think that necessarily prevents me from being an artist. 

Saw a painting of a man by Van Gogh done early in his career.  The man had none of that magic evident in Van Gogh's later work.  But he was learning.  He had to be awkward and stiff and clumsy.  It was part of the journey.  He allowed himself to do things badly knowing that with practice and diligence he would improve.  And boy, did he ever!

Was searching for Toowoomba Art Gallery's next show and saw that it was entitled Imagine You Know.  Imagine You Know is to showcase up and coming local and regional artists.  (I've got butterflies just contemplating writing the next sentence).  So I thought I'd download their registration form and see if perhaps I might possibly enter one or two paintings.  (Egad!  Just writing that is making me feel slightly ill.)

Well, that's okay.  I've just read the entry guide and it is far far too complicated for me.  Works having to meet certain size standards, with particular ways of hanging required (no string, thank you), photos put on CD Roms, written explanations of why the works should be accepted within the curatorial guidelines set out by TRAG (Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery) as well as a curriculum vitae.  I'm much too lazy for all that. 

There are hundreds of thousands of artists who can do all that without blinking an eye.  Makes me want to cry just thinking of it.  Makes it all too serious.  I'm much too fragile (oh, can't believe it but I still feel like crying) to subject myself to all that 'stuff'.  Deep breath.  Okay, I'll do art for the reasons I've always done art; because I like making something that wasn't there before.  Because I have an idea and think it would be fun interesting necessary (like breathing) to try and bring it out into the 'real' world. 

That part of me that wanted to cry just then.  I've never looked too closely at that.  It is the same part that howled with frustration when I couldn't learn how to balance a chequebook.  Must be tied in with my idea of myself conflicting wih the reality.  And something to do with work.  I'll work very hard at things I enjoy but just thinking of the frustration to be experienced with organizing everything, especially the computer stuff and paying someone to frame things at the same time of not knowing whether my work is good enough.  I just want someone to walk in one day and say, Wow, your work is fabulous!  Where have you been hiding?  But it doesn't happen like that.  People put a lot of time and effort to get their work out there.  Hell, I'm barely able to put a photo on the blog.  Just tried with The Suspended Man and failed.  Why I find it so hard to download things then find them then do something with them is beyond me.  Anyway, enough for today.  I'm done.  It's killing the happy.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Picasso said it took him a lifetime to learn how to paint like a child.  The daughter of a friend of ours gave me a painting of a toucan.  I adore it.  He's got a huge green and pink beak which strides majestically across the top of the paper, a black body and an orange breast ingeniously shaded on the lower third to indicate three dimensionality.  His eye ring is grey and the background is orange.  He's out of proportion.  Feathers are not indicated.  The body is crammed into 1/4 of the paper while the beak takes up a third and the orange background has streaks and smudges going every which way.  Yet it works.  I would have been so proud to have painted it.  As it is I am proud it was given to me.  The artist is Isabel.  She's seven years old. 

Her work makes my work look contrived and laboured.   The spontaneity and truth of that toucan cannot be equalled by anything of mine.  A few years ago we attended a school exhibition of budding artists at the local shire hall.  I bought a painting for $30.  It's of three different parrots sitting on a brown branch with daisy like flowers floating in the air.  There is a green and gold macaw and a male and female eclectus (I think).  It is 'naive' and crudely done but it colourful and spontaneous and oh so right.  Again, I would have been proud to have painted it.  The artist, when I complimented her on her work, was shy and not inclined to talk.  I think she was about 10 or 11. 

Admiring these two paintings and their truth I begin to understand what Picasso meant.  Which doesn't mean I'll give up painting.  I won't but it will inspire me to keep searching for that inner truth which children access so well and which adults hide under a lifetime of learning and intellectualizing and bruised and/or well guarded ego. 

Dreamed of a willie wagtail which sat on my hand.  It was thirsty and put its bill in the corner of my mouth to drink my saliva.  I tried to make a self-waterer for it so that it could have clean water and not be dependent upon my spit for moisture.  That's all I remember of the dream but the image has stayed with me.  I tried to sketch it last night but it didn't work.  Think it needs a closeup of the lower half of the face and the bird positioned slightly different on the hand.  Very important that the hand is in view.  That's the only part of the sketch I'm happy with, the sweep and curve of the wrist and forearm.  What small things yet the grace and beauty of the wrist where it joins the hand is majestic. 

Have almost finished the man suspended over the vat of water.  No idea what it means, where it came from or even if it works.  It's very simple and pared down yet I like it.  There's something intrinsically attractive about mirrors, doorways, windows, rooms viewed from without, bubbles, reflections, water and 'dimensions' although trying to replicate three dimensions on a two dimensional surface is hard enough without adding a fourth or fifth.