In drawing, and drawing you his pains were delectable
his flames like water
Rumi 222
In his despair he drew the colors from his own heart
Cy Twombly's Untitled (Say Goodbye Catalus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), 1994
and yet there on the other shore
under the dark gaze
sun in your eyes
you were there
the other side
the other dawn
the other birth
and yet there you were in the last time
drop by drop
on Wabi-Sabi, by Leonard Koren
Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else.
Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from the freedom of things.
complexity in the commonplace
'People are a marvelous mystery to me. I often see them in color; some are ruddy and some are silver gray. They're moods in themselves. To me everyone is as important as everyone else; everything is as important as everything else. In some way a tree is just as important as a person, in its own life.' -Andrew Wyeth, from Andrew Wyeth A Secret Life by Richard Merryman
Andrew Wyeth, Coot Hunter, 1941
Odilon Redon's Armor
I saw this piece a long time ago on a trip to the Met, it has stayed with me over the years ….. making me wonder can you take on armor without it integrating, becoming a part of your person?, useful but not continuously shielding? ….
Odilon Redon, Armor, 1891, charcoal and conte crayon, 20x14.5"
Frederick Franck
'The good drawings I do are hardly mine. Only the bad ones are mine for they are the ones where I can't let go, am caught in the Me-cramp ...
That which draws in SEEING/DRAWING is that which I really am, but which I cannot possibly define and label. It simply defines itself by the way it draws. SEEING/DRAWING therefore is an impossible effort as long as the ego tries to force it. Once the ego lets go, it becomes effortless.
Emerson deflates the pseudo-originality the ego strains for: "What you are speaks so loudly, I can't hear what you say." A Zen sage has said: "You are putting a head on top of the one you already have ..."
In the bad drawings the parts remain parts. But good or bad, once a drawing is finished it should be forgotten. After all, it is only a fossil of experience - a fossil, however, that at any time can be resurrected by any eye that is sufficiently awake to follow the lines as process, to sense that a DRAWING IS NOT A THING BUT AN ACT.'
- Frederick Franck's the Zen of Seeing SEEING/DRAWING as meditation
Frederick Franck, from Moments of Seeing
initiation song from the finders' lodge
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
- - Ursula LeGuin