Painting as Meditation

Painting as meditation is not about getting a good result but finding a place to play.  Here, for example, I am sitting with my back propped against a rock on a hillside amongst trees.  I want to be out here with the wind and the threat of rain, hard earth under my backside, birds around me.  My aim is not to find a picture and use artists' techniques to put it on the page.  That is not the anxiety I want to confront.  There are other anxieties that flutter at the back of my conscious mind, which normally I ignore or allow to whisper in the shadows: time is passing; I am going to die; am I worthwhile; do I please myself; do I please others?  When I paint these questions come into the foreground but in a healthy awareness of the present moment.  I learn to live with what my eyes see and the corresponding marks my hand makes.  This is what makes it a meditation and it doesn't have to be good.  It just is what it is.

Poetry and Painting

I have a copy of Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North next to my bed in Villandás. I don't so much read it as browse it.  It's chewy reading as you would expect from someone who spends time considering what he is about before committing the words to a defined form.

When I go out to the woods and sit amongst the trees, Basho comes to mind if only because he also used to sit under trees and took his name from the banana tree under which he sat for long periods.  If that is the case then I should call myself Roble instead of Jason because I often sit under an oak tree with my back resting against a vertical rock that emerges from the mountainside.

Recently I have been using text and image together.  I cannot see myself as a Japanese brush painter, though.  When I place a mark on the page I do not see the sword strike of the samurai master but something much more provisional and hesitant.  It started with a sketchbook I painted and wrote for my children and has developed from there, so it is part of a more prosaic diary-writing Romantic tradition.

One part of the benefit of painting to me is the manner in which it allows me to accept myself.  This is a continual struggle.  I place a mark on the page and recognise it as an extension of myself with all the tremor of my unsteady hand.  The image itself is painfully revealing.  The text should do something similar: slapped down breathing on the page.

As a teacher, both of writing and painting, how can I not be aware of the difficulty of this acceptance?  I have seen many children screw up their work, as if horrified at what they have in front of them.  I want to feel that horror.  I don't want to just paint pretty pictures.

Links to other blogs

I know I haven't been paying attention to this blog recently.  This is partly because I have been active on other blogs in other places.  I don't want to abandon this one, but in the meantime here are the links to my other blogspots:

jasonpreater.wordpress.com
menemenetekel.wordpress.com
openingchapters.wordpress.com

Why so many blogs?  I guess I'm just a junkie!