Studying classical realist art, at the beginning, is all about building skill. This skill requires hand-eye coordination, controlled and smooth movements of the drawing and painting arm and hand, and an educated way of seeing light and form, that identifies what is there, and also sees and transmits the movement and life in what I am looking at to my page and canvas. These skills are both conceptual and physical. They require the mind and the body to work together. Does this sound familiar? Years of yoga practice and movement exploration have honed my kinesthetic sense of the body, its gestures, shapes, and movements. When I can sense kinesthetically in my own body the movement in what I am drawing, my own drawing begins to come to life. I am now cultivating and enjoying the fluidity in my body as a way of gradually achieving more fluidity in my art. It doesn’t happen all at once. But every new skill set takes time. And I have enough experience now with different forms of art, music, and practice, to bring what I already know into what is new and let a fresh synthesis take form.
I feel strongly that art should not be created at the sacrifice of the body, scrunched up into some hunched over position over the drawing for hours and days. What I am creating must come from a healthy and supple body that is ready to move, is ready to dance. There is one through-line, one thread from my eye’s seeing, to my hand, to the paper.
Why am I doing this? I see and feel so much in the world that is extraordinary, beautiful, and alive. From my experiences, images come into my mind that want to be born. These images are infused not only with the qualities of my worldly of experience, but with a light that is more real than the image itself. This light is an emanation of the divine. It is what I actually am, what you are, what earth is. So I aspire to paint as a devotion, turning towards this light. And my aspiration is that my painting may hold a spark, that, when seen by another, may serve as an invitation to turn towards the flame that is real life.
Why is it important to turn towards the light? Because the world that we have called “real” is in the process of self destruction. And as it self-destructs, those embedded within it experience ever more challenge, trauma, being limited and controlled, monitored, surveilled, drugged, medically altered, blamed, and being told, “you are worth nothing, and you are the problem.” There are many religious and spiritual conceptual systems which promise divinity and enlightenment, but mostly these remain conceptual worlds that at best numb the pain of what is actually happening.
As I was growing up, my father told me over and over that the human being is a transcendent being, designed to continuously develop, evolve, and go beyond limitations into newly created horizons. This is built into our biology. No amount of distraction, denial, or coercion can change this or take away the potential that we are. I was raised with one foot in a natural and divine world, and one foot in what we call “reality,” which is all about money, power, surviving, and maybe praying to a distant God. I’ve known that there is another way of being, that is seamless and radiant, yet I didn’t know how to fully be that way while living in this world of the physical body and physical reality. After a long journey of healing, learning and growing I am moved to learn the skills of artistic representation, from a state of fluid embodiment, turning towards light that emanates and comes forward the more that I silently turn towards it.
To create art that can hold the spark of what is pouring forth in my heart, to be an invitation to devotion that is not to something other, but to the truth of what is, and what we are, this is a very great task. It is a journey. My efforts are humble. I often feel frustrated. But that is momentary, and it passes. To achieve anything worth while in this physical world takes work. And now the work is infused with so many moments where there is a pouring forth of light, in which I know that even the efforts of a beginning art student can be made in devotion, no matter if my drawing is not yet capable of holding what I see. Every day I begin again. Every day I move, I learn, I turn again to the radiance that is here.
