Tag: art

Paint Like a Child

I had a show and studio sale several years ago, took everything, almost, from my studio, installed it in the local library.  Probably a thousand pieces of art– drawings, paintings, scraps, beginnings.  The walls were covered.  Three or four tables were covered with stacks of papers– drawings and paintings.  A friend came, spent hours looking through just about everything.  He’s an artist too.

At the end of the afternoon, he came to me and said, “I can only afford to buy one; this is it.  This one speaks to me.  This one really has something.  What can you tell me about it?”

I said, “This is ironic.  That’s the one piece here that wasn’t painted by me.”

He said, eyes wide, “Who, then?”

Then he saw I was amused, and so he was too.

I said, I don’t know who, but it was some 8-year-old child who painted with me at the county fair last summer.  Somehow their painting got mixed with mine….”

Looking Closely

This is what i want to paint:

What it is that dwells here

I know not

But my heart is filled with awe

And the tears trickle down.

–anonymous 11th century Japanese

I think that if you look closely at anything, and for long enough, this poem is what you find arising in yourself.  That is one thing i have learned over these years.  And, here is the thing:  the more you experience this, and the more deeply, the more…everything is changed.

For me, art is about looking closely at something, and following your response where it leads.  Whether that something is a leaf, a mountain, a human face, a memory of your childhood, the love you feel for your child, your joy, your rage– look closely, follow your response.  (You have to learn to listen to your response, and to trust it).

Art is a medium.  You make something as you follow your response; the thing you make embodies your response, and at the same time it is the means of your response– it helps you to find your response, and gives you tools by which you can listen ever more deeply, to as it were unpeel the layers of your response.

Maybe art is something different to others.  Maybe what i am doing is not art.  But this is what i want to do.