As I work with color, I am finding that I have friends. Prussian Blue, who comes to my rescue, again and again. Lemon Yellow, who enjoys creating a highlight, maybe softened with Titanium White. These friends dance with me, through each and every painting, and I am finding that I recognize them easily and often seem to know where they belong.
This is a different kind of identity, the identity of color across many works in progress. My eye seeks the colors in the landscape, and notes the way they are changed on my palette. I am fascinated by peaches, the colors, I mean. Red-golds, softened again with Titanium white; I might even ease a touch of Yellow Ochre in to mute the light, only so that it can dance elsewhere.
Ordinarily, I suppose, the mind moves first to the shapes and the objects. There is the hill, sloping off toward the right. Or the figure, made tiny by the mountains, but drawing our eye because we identify with him. But color, as a theme, makes a different unity. The blue on the mountain top is hidden by fog but returns, joyfully, in the depths of the trees, in shadow.
My teacher used to tell us to try and see the Self in the eyes of the other. I loved this exercise, and still do. The blue of the water, the mountain, the shaded snow all match the blue eyes of the person I speak with. The deep brown pools I see in the eyes of some are reflected in shadowed sunlight penetrating a stream; molten gold-brown inviting rest and quiet. Who is this Self that you can see again and again, first in one and then in another? First at one moment, and then at another? It is your Self-same being as it dances in many forms. Try it yourself. Can you see the sameness in the differences; the oneness in the many?
One of the exercises I have learned about in art is the exercise of drawing the negative spaces. Instead of drawing the branch, you draw the shape around the branch. Perhaps the viewer will not see the exercise in the image, but the artist, in doing it, discovers a kind of upside down perception, a way of seeing that works equally well, but challenges the mind and seems to open up a whole universe of perception.
We are accustomed to seeing individuals as particular beings. There is our friend, our family member, our partner-each is considered a cohesive whole, separate from others. But what do we really mean by this? Isn’t it true that the person we identify by name and consider to be a “someone” is actually very different hour by hour; varying in context as different features of the personality come forward-mysteriously and instantly adjusting to “circumstance”.
There are times when a person lights up; made brilliant by some perception-some recognition or seeing. This shininess, appearing as it does in different “individuals” at different times seems to have a kind of identity of its own. It is the identity of spacious awareness. This shiny awareness seems to ebb and flow- in and out of different individuals and produces in me a familiar sense of expansiveness. Ah, I think, there is my Friend again, rising in this moment to let the mystery come forward. This Friend, like a color, crosses the boundary of shape and form, and the boundary of personality, of moments in time like some friendly ghost for whom distinct identity is meaningless. Or rather, these butterfly movements of my friend, alights in one and than another “individual” gently, but oh so much more loud to my consciousness than the momentariness of mood or emotion, situation or human birth. This Friend is Self, manifesting in you or me, when the conditions are right, or when it is simply moved to show up again, friend to friend, Self to Self with an visibility a thousand times stronger than our momentary individual lives.
You can practice seeing this way, just as you can practice drawing the negative space instead of the object. It is habit of mind to see the object as primary and distinct. But the same picture is easily obtained by drawing the negative space. Isn’t it just choice? Choice to assume that personality is a distinct entity? Is this notion really anymore sensible than saying that Self manifests here and there, moment by moment, whether we see it or not, because abiding awareness is our true nature?
(Why am I putting a paywall here? The reason is that I feel certain mysteries should only be shared with people who are especially motivated, and not for the casual listener. In other words, one shouldn’t share sacred truths too easily.)
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