Proportion of Light and Dark Shapes (Block-Ins)

I just completed Week 2's assignment in my Schoolism Essentials of Realism course. The first assignments were to block-in the light and dark shapes of an image, gradually getting more complex in each stage. Sometimes I would work backwards, doing a more complicated one and realizing I can simplify it. It takes a lot of squinting to see these shapes and a lot of thinking to know where and how to indicate them.

The following images are from the second assignment, where I'm no longer tracing over reference, but using comparative measurement to redraw a larger version in several block-in stages.

Learning lots from Jonathan Hardesty in this course and enjoying these challenging visual puzzles!

Thanks for reading,
Anthony

Jim's Andy, Doubt and Direct Experience

I doubt a lot. I doubt myself, my work, my path, my environment, my ideas, my contradictory thoughts, actions and just a whole bunch of stuff. I doubt people. All that I doubt in myself, I project doubt onto them about these things too. I doubt my projections. I doubt life itself, and I had for a moment a thought during meditation that maybe this doubt isn't so bad 'after all.' I doubt this too, a little.

I've found that certain things become more credible for me as tools to navigate life with as I use them and understand what their place is for me within the universal impersonal changes in life. Some of the things for me right now are practices. One is art (drawing and painting), one is dance (Mandala Movement), one is Qi-Gong and one is Vipassana Meditation as taught by S. N. Goenka. Another one is writing this weekly blog post and making a monthly Youtube video. And of course the last one, but not the least, is working on my story, (secret title.)

Richard Feymann had commented once that doubt is a key component of his personality and who he is. Science requires doubt, so that we can test our theories, know whether we're right or wrong and then start again. Without doubt, we could stop any scientific exploration and live as we are. That is the feeling I had during meditation, that doubt is the other side of the coin of exploration and creative invention. Doubt is the yin to consistent curiosity and exploration as yang. Of course, I doubt this when I state it as an intellectual point. I don't doubt it in the experience I have of it. The 'intuition' of it, one might say, but I'd actually rather not say anything like that either.

What my practices do for 'me' is bring me into the direct experience of something that has no doubt whatsoever. In hindsight, in my intellectual activity, I may look at it and doubt it. I may not understand it fully in words and theories. These full living experiences are not always result oriented and cannot 'always' have the 1+1=2 literacy. In a day to day existence, I can't say what does what in terms of cause and effect. I can have guesses, but it won't be one hundred percent accurate. When I'm practicing Vipassana meditation, I can experience this shifting take place without a measurement. It is undeniable, direct, choice-less awareness of reality. It's hard to put words here, because I feel when I say 'reality,' someone can say that that is a subjective 'idea.' It is NOT when you are experiencing it directly, which may be a bit paradoxical, or simply unable to be proven right or wrong, true or false.

It is unable to be truly calculated and one might call that insanity, but too much calculation is actual insanity. This analysis mindset breaks spontaneity, poetry, intuition, faith and experience. Attention is caring and the action required to live objectively. It is attention that we can rely on first, because otherwise any new discoveries will be based on old thought. Doubt can be a deep, fulfilling component to realizations and their explanations. Doubt gives us the courage to go into uncharted territory and come back with something to share, when we understand that doubt is our tool for growth. Too much doubt, on one hand, can be just like too much calculation. We think we know and therefore we get the results we've 'set in stone.' For example, my recent arm injury has become very clearly a direct representation of my mindset for approaching my artwork. A mindset that is detrimental and short-sighted. See the picture below. These examples may shine all around us when we know how to see them. We are also free to doubt them, but sometimes they deserve the credit for being so blatantly obvious, in hindsight.

~This says, "I have to get better" (at art - mental) on one side, changing into "I have to get better" (with my arm injury - physical). A direct translation, just a different context showed up because I needed to learn the lesson all the same and change my thoughts about myself. The thing didn't matter, just the application of it and thankfully I had the context change enough to show me what I wasn't noticing. 'Enjoying my pain,' because it helped me see.~

I was thinking about food and how someone might be a good chef. Their food is good, so we want them to cook and we want to eat their food. This is how we think, yet at another level, gratitude can change the quality of the experience of any food so drastically that we don't need to get someone good to cook, in a way. As I write this, I'm bouncing around my memories of Jim and Andy, a movie with Jim Carrey going into how he acted as Andy Kaufman in 'Man on the Moon.' He experienced something surreal with this performance and permeated it into the cast and the process of making the film. He doesn't fully understand it in all its levels, but it came together none the less and the movie was well made within that chaotic, emotional state of transformation and questioning. All context can be tools for this transforming and our transforming can give all context validity. Seeing representations of things can help us to put our observations in perspective, and help us observe more.

Other examples coming to mind are when the first picture of Earth was taken from the space station. The observation of the wholeness of Earth and how that's our home changed the perspectives of many people. The picture represented that and helped us see it. The other day I had not done something that I felt would have been fun. I reacted, thought too much about it and fell into a fearful stasis. Right after, my jacket strings got tangled in a mess and were tangled around my neck and head as I put the jacket on. I was like, "What's going on?!" The strings were choking me, as I had choked. I had to take my jacket off and work to untie the knot. Being a bit frustrated as I untied it, I stopped. I took a breath and thought, "this is a representation of the fear I just experienced. When I untie this knot, I'm untying that fearful patterning I just experienced." After that thought, the untying was easy, as if I was just aligning with what the truth of the situation was. The energy of that activity was no longer about finishing it, but about knowing what it represented. Here's some tangled headphones, which I can untie using that same mentality of processing, contrary to frustration.

When thinking about the value of meditation and the free mind that acts without pretense and with a freshness of creative insight sometimes beyond logical, comprehensive calculation, I found that it is in certain practices that I experience this knowing. With Qi-Gong, Vipassana, Mandala Movement, I am more 'with' the experiencing of it than anything else. "How can I even be anywhere else?" One imagines. It is with thought that I can identify with things that are projections and therefore feel elsewhere. I am not aligned with what I'm doing at the intimate feeling level and the total understanding of it through a direct, objective, universal awareness. I know the difference when I'm with that or living in ideas and projections. When I'm not IN it, or WITH it, then I am in a division between an idea or image of myself, other labelled things, and the perception of what is here and now. Basically, process V.S. result, but being totally with something can still lead to tremendous results, such as in Andy Kaufman's (or Jim Carrey's?) 'Man on the Moon,' and also in life itself. This doesn't just happen in the movies folks.

We come to think that we are finished human beings, that we won't change any more. There's a study that talks about how people think they would still like to see their current favorite band ten years from now, and pay more money to see them.  Yet, most of them wouldn't care to see the band that was their favorite ten years ago, today. This is our choosing to find that perfect chef, because he's what we think we want. When I'm truly present, I don't need anything. It's just like Jim Carrey says at the end of Jim and Andy, "I have no ambition." I am living life, when I'm living it, so what else could I possibly ask for? MORE than everything that my experience is? How can that be reached? This is the kind of 'new' common sense that I integrate into my psyche with every moment that I'm in creative process mode and not in quick, efficient result mode. I am understanding the balance and the connection of these two modes (as I doubt if they are separate) more and more.

What I get from my weekly, daily, monthly practices is a sense that what I'm doing all the time, no matter what the thing is, is more like a practice of moving energy, such as Qi-Gong, or watching my energy move, such as Vipassana. In typing this, I can write it as if I'm doing a Mandala Movement 'dance' and move in a natural, flowing way. I can feel as though there is a lightness in my work because I'm just playing with waves, trees and movements in the body. I can experience an effortless witnessing of these things that require a focus to come into fruition and yet not lose a clarity of boundless attention that it is aware of all passing, changing movements in freedom. Of course, I doubt my clearly stated words when I know in my experience I bounce around in my thoughts like a lunatic sometimes, but so did Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman. I may sometimes be doubting or losing the battle against myself, or battling myself (and therefore losing), or just simply not too sure about what it is I should do, until I sit and get so engaged with reality that I don't miss a thing. Therefore, I continue to rest, return and continue, on all levels of my experience with what is.

Thanks for reading,
If you like this, please share and continue coming back every Sunday for a new post.

Reflections on Peace, Programs and Projects: Dynamism and Selectivity

In recent weeks, I've participated in a program facilitated by a friend and mentor of mine. She guided a group of eight of us through a booklet to educate ourselves about ourselves. In other words, we met week by week and would focus on some aspect of life, arranged week by week in the program to add to the previous week and build a supportive, integrative, deeper understanding of how we can be the change we wish to see in the world. At the beginning of this program I was reading a book by Paul R. Fleischman, m. d., called "cultivating inner peace." The book was inspiring on many levels. Paul is a teacher of Vipassana meditation and also a retired psychiatrist, poet and reader. His language is diverse and influential and he inspired my intention for peace, purity and the program. The other important aspect of my goal was to bring this peace into more productive work on my personal artistic project, a story which inspires the same spacious clarity that Paul's words do. Cue the sticky note collection.

Now, how do I approach beginning to summarize this book and remove these sticky notes growing out of it? No easy task. Necessarily, I had to review the entire program's booklet as well as Paul's book to fully articulate the new intentions the program has asked me to create in its final week of exercises. Throughout the nine week program, I've noticed several changes in myself. In summary, I have been more attentive and less judging, more spacious and less time-bound and planned as well as more spontaneous and less mentally abrasive. I set out on this quest for peace long before this program, but a little tap on the shoulder every week has brought to light some new insights and approaches to unlearning patterning that conflicts with fresh, desirable perception and harmonious creating of freedom. I also used these weekly exercises with a selective acuteness to accomplish my goal. At the beginning of this program, I set an intention for it. I wrote it down as follows.

Goal: To continuously re-energize a committed relationship of dynamic participation and reverence in peace and purity that permeates every moment of engaged life.

Quite a mouthful, but it hits a mark. "Cultivating inner peace" begins with a personal quest, at whatever pace you read, and in life. No matter the place, "always invisible, but present, peace is seen in messages from the cosmic ray of gratitude." As I reflect on both the program and the re-reading of my sticky-noted paragraphs, I am grateful for the "peace in friendship and in all things," and for my attraction to seeking it. I seek it in daily life and in the work on my personal artistic story. Is it contradictory to seek peace? How can one seek the "miracle of freshness?" Once the door is open, it is something to continually return to with care and diligence. I do this through meditation daily as a fail safe, but also as much as I can in every moment. Peace is a way of life and therefore our path to it is the pace of our lives. It is in our clear seeing and "courageous confrontations with suffering" that peace matures.

"Our lives are feelings, unfolding slowly with an invisible tempo." In recent months, I had to slow down my directed art practice of 40+ hours a week. Rest, care and attention were the dynamic components to an arm that's doing much better now. As "peace is the result of solution: getting things to mix and flow," I was forced to return to a simpler pace to balance my life. Peace is dynamic. It is "not an absence of problems, but a set of tools to properly deal with them." A tool set changes as our context does, and it is "necessary to have a dynamic relationship to your mood and idea of peace." With a refreshed returning to art practice and with the guidance of Jeff Watts' critiques, I feel more confident that my success as an artist is inevitable in practice. As the book Mastery by George Leonard states, "practice is a possession." I feel that I am possessing it more deeply with "respect for life . . . simplicity . . . a quiet pace, with time to wonder, ponder and observe, persisting in quiet, steady triumph with deep personal satisfaction." This attitude of reverence accomplishes much more in the creation of my story than I could plan.

(Yet writing a story still takes file organizing, however intuitive.)

"To concentrate on peaceful enterprises is doubly calming, from both the process and the content of focus." As I re-engage with my art and story, I know that it is not when it's done (result), but when it's done (process) that satisfaction must be actualized. An example in Paul's book is the Shaker people, who had "no division between daily life and worship. There was only the sacred world, no profane - the Kingdom of Heaven was to be actualized on earth." As we confront the old programming, we must select the new from a cultivated awareness and equanimity. "The first step is envisioning beyond each troubling circumstance in the direction of peace. Peace is interwoven with the character virtues of faith and persistence." Someone cannot live their whole life without peace and expect peace at the end of it. We create our karma and the universe matches you.

To create something new, I must feel new. The context of my life is dynamic and simple enough to provide the safety to listen, appreciate and receive instead of living in a biological mode of fight or flight. I'm grateful for that support. I select it to be so and it allows for these meditative hours to explore and accompany any suffering. Suffering makes me look deeper to learn what truly harbors unity and spirit to nurture this returning to attention, care and wonder. "The capacity to choose and sustain objectives of attention, to gate out the irrelevant, and to appreciate what one has, are aspects of self-regulation that enable both action and satisfaction. Satisfaction means to feel you've done enough." Recently, I had felt that I was not doing enough, artistically and in creating my I.P. It is in the realization that I am good enough to take the next step that I have abundance. It is in playing that I feel the nature of my process and success, the two uniting in one another, like the yin and yang. It is not later that I will have peace, but now that I have begun to walk. It is in a shared studio environment that I continue mastery as a way of life, not as a goal to be reached elsewhere.

(A joined work space with my brother. Two double monitor set ups and everything we need.)

To quote some peace-living examples from Paul's book, "The Nearings coupled a deep inspiration toward peaceful living with a dynamic sense of the process itself. The value in doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination, the perseverance, the effort and the struggle which go into the project. Life is enriched by aspiration and effort."

"Because peace can't be grasped or held constant, faith in its possibility and resolution to actualize it are its recurrent preconditions. The dynamism of peace precludes absolutism, rigidity, finality. Peace isn't accomplished, never endures beyond a moment, and must be reborn, recreated in the next. Peace is atomic."

Thanks for reading,
- Anthony

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Jon, Jeff, Claude and the Cool, Funny Illusion of Reality in Art

Quite the blog title. If you've been following my Youtube channel and/or my blog posts here, you know that I am signed up for the Live Stream Watts Atelier course, 20 Figure Lay-ins and I'm receiving a weekly critique video back from Jeffrey R. Watts each week. Overlapping this, coming up on November 13th, is a Schoolism critiqued class where the enthusiastic Jonathan Hardesty will be critiquing my work each week too. Both classes will end around the same time near the end of December.

The way that the Watts critiques work is simpler. Jeff prints out the images sent in by the students, sits down at his drawing pad and tapes one after the other, tracing over top of them and talks while he does it. We get to see all the students' critiques in the video we're sent, and our personal critique is somewhere in the pile.

Schoolism uses computers. Ha ha. The benefit of their more digital way of doing things is that Jon will be able to show me with a 'Bing' search (inside joke: Jon uses bing on his weekly live stream) what a certain artist does in this or that visual scenario. He can reference artists, show me their work and show me what he's describing and why they do it well etc. I found this super helpful in a ten minute critique he gave me as a preview, in which he mentioned a few things he thought were good and could use improvement on my work. I also think that since art is a visual language, it not only helps to have someone draw over the image, but reference the artwork that has done it well. Jeff will reference artists who do something well, but it's not visible when he's referencing it until you look it up yourself and usually he's moving on to something else unless you pause the video. Now that I'm mentioning that, I might do that more often.

I don't have much good artwork hanging on the walls in my house. It was earlier this year that I remembered why I have this print of Robert Bateman's.

I realized it was because he inspired me as a young artist. I still have the picture up, but he's not as inspiring as he used to be. His work is too hyper real for my interest. I appreciate it, but it doesn't capture the magic of making art as illusion. I think Jeff and Jon agree with me on having more of an appreciation of art that is suggestive and realistic, but not always rendered at every inch. Take this piece below by Jeff. It is not until I squinted my eyes that I could barely make out a fox hat on this man's head. That's COOL. And as I say it's COOL, it's even cooler that I'm still somewhat unsure if it's a fox hat. Ha! It's a bit over the top on this piece, as Jeff comments on his Instagram (Jeff's Instagram) yet it's still amazing and awesome, I think.

Richard Schmid is a master at this kind of loose realism, in which something looks real from a distance, but up close it looks as if a child scribbled in color. That color not only harmonizes as Jeff comments, but it is established while representing something of truth, like a man with a fox hat. (It is easier to see the hat when it's thumb-nailed super small.)

Recently I was at a thrift store and I decided to buy a Claude Monet print that was framed and a cheap price. I liked it for its feeling and atmosphere, but also the fact that I was picking up on all the things I've heard Jon say in his Essentials of Realism course regarding observing and depicting what you see, rather than what you think. I find there to be a great funniness in the sense of illusion that art brings in this way. When I can observe the thumbnail version, or a framed painting at a distance and have it be a person or landscape, but when I go close it looks like pencil and paint markings, I am impressed. I'm not only impressed by the technique, but the other day I was looking at the Monet in that way and I laughed out loud. It's hilarious, for some reason, to be able to make that kind of illusion. I think it reflects the way I perceive life a lot of the time, as a crazy nonsensical movement of energy and my changing perspectives on things. It IS humorous and this kind of art inspires that kind of perspective.

Here is a few close ups of parts of the Monet hanging on my wall and a distance shot where you can see the whole painting that looks real, but it's really an illusion.

A nice atmospheric landscape.

A sail boat and a man standing on it. Wait, is that a paint stroke? Is that man's head just a black smudged dot? That church looks like it has holes in it.

What IS THIS? Those are windows? I can still see the stuff I saw, but it's barely formed at all.

LOOK AT THIS! Amazing. It's just dark shapes, but somehow it comes together as a real thing.

A boat and trees. Really? That's all there is to it? How the...

I think Jon's course will help me identify what's after 'the...' He's a really good teacher for making things clear in the how's and what's of art. One thing I realized he says a lot that Jeff almost never says is to compare something to something else within the painting or drawing you're making. As in, don't say "it's just dark shapes," but ask "is that shape darker or lighter than this other shape?" Again and again, compare to understand. I've never really heard Jeff talk about comparing the values, edges, proportion, shape or anything directly within a single drawing. He'll say the broad concepts over and over, like this is a firm edge or something, but that idea of looking at it within the context of the single drawing is incredibly useful. I think he'll help me, bit by bit, to be able to see how to create an illusion like this boat. Within that close up, it doesn't look like much. Take it back to the big picture, and that boat has the context of the water line, people, church, second boat and so on. That makes a difference.

Thanks for reading,
Anthony