Nibbana

The time has come to say goodbye.

This past month has been an interesting adventure in cultivating mindfulness.  I think that I have gained a greater appreciation for the different ways that art can be used.  The work that I did was more than an exercise to improve my skills or a way to capture images.  It served as a way to connect to people, a way to focus on the moment at hand, and a way to try and see reality as it is.

I found drawing to be an excellent way to focus.  It kept me present and it pushed me to shake off any preconceived ideas about reality that I was holding onto.  It was very effective to have a tangible indicator that I wasn't being mindful (a bad drawing) or that I was (a good drawing).  The process was very goal oriented, which made it easier to commit to than any other type of meditation I had previously attempted. Throughout the course of this project I have seen an improvement in both my drawing abilities and my ability to calm my mind and be present.

I think that the most important thing that drawing through a Buddhist perspective did for me was to increase my capacity for compassion.  I found that I was unable to draw without feeling a great deal of love towards my subject.  I had always had a difficult time reconciling the idea of feeling compassion for all things and seeing reality as it really is.  Everything is imperfect, so why wouldn't noticing and scrutinizing those imperfections make the world more painful?  Why wouldn't you choose to ignore the ugly things and get on with your life?  Everything will be better that way.

However, the opposite is true.  When you close yourself off to the quirks and imperfections of the world, you also miss all the things that make it truly beautiful.  It is possible to find beauty and wonder in a crumpled up chocolate wrapper or the one feature that you're most self-conscious about.  The kind of amazement that comes from examining the world carefully and honestly is a result of accepting that you are viewing an impermanent object that will never be exactly like it is right at this moment.  It's easy to miss if you aren't careful to stay completely in the present moment.

And if you can inhabit the present as it really is, you might even wake up.

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Thank you to everyone who sat still for me, let me draw their things, helped me brainstorm ideas, and kept me going.  It has been an lovely experience.

Still* Life

It's been a while since I've posted anything.  Things are picking up and the world seems to be moving faster and faster.  I think that that is one of the reasons this next project was so appealing.  It's just objects - everything is still and simple.  Also, it's pretty easy to create a composition when you can just throw some things on your bed and call it a day.  Case in point:

Another use for pears while they ripen

Although this format was initially chosen due to its simplicity, I think that still lifes are very interesting from a Buddhist perspective.  They highlight one of the fundamentally un-Buddhist aspects of drawing - every image is an attempt to capture an impermanent moment in a permanent way.  While drawing, I had to be very careful not to upset my bedsheets, because if I did the composition would change.  I also ate some of the pears after the picture was finished, because they were finally ripe and pears are delicious.  I could never replicate this display no matter how hard I might try.  The image is the only record of a scene that was lost as soon as I moved to put my sketchbook away.

And yet, not even the drawing is permanent.  The graphite and white charcoal smudge easily, the paper can rip or simply disintegrate with time. In a similar vein, I too will one day die and deteriorate, civilization will fall, humans will go extinct, and the earth will eventually be consumed by the sun.  Please excuse me while I go stave off an existential crisis.

 In the meantime, enjoy a picture of a cup

If you take a step back from the philosophical ledge, impermanence isn't actually that terrifying.  It's something we experience every day without panic or ceremony.  Shoes wear out in the toes, fruit rots before we get around to eating it, ivy covers abandoned buildings and slowly pulls them apart.  If change occurs slowly enough, it is easy to accept.  The difficult part is to confront the inherent changeability of every aspect of our lives, especially the things that seem the most permanent and stable.

For instance, the mug above strikes me as an incredibly durable object.  It has a comfortingly solid weight, shiny glaze that covers the exterior, and is essentially made of stone.  If I were to set it on a table and stare at it for a year, it would remain the same except for a layer of dust.  However, at any moment I could knock it off the table and it would shatter on the floor.  Even the most stable object has the potential to fall apart, whether you look at it from a Buddhist or an entropic perspective.

For this composition I ran around BC&T looking for trash to draw. I also found a stone bird

So what do we do with this rather bleak outlook?  For me, it speaks to another mark of existence - interconnectedness.  We are all linked because we are all falling apart.  Although a still life can cling to the idea of depicting an unchanging world, it can also highlight the transient nature of objects.  I hope that this is something that I can convey in my still lifes.

Lovely Valentines

The results are in! I was able to convince five lovely people to sit for me for my loving-kindness meditation exercise.  I really enjoyed this experiment because it gave me a new perspective on portraiture.  Drawing portraits is a uniquely intimate experience.  For some people, the experience of having someone stare at their face for fifteen minutes is unnerving.  On my side of the paper, there is a lot of pressure to create something that I won't be ashamed to show people.  In situations like these, everyone can feel judged, anxious, and uncomfortable.

This is why loving-kindness is so necessary.  By re-framing my intentions and motivations, drawing ceased to be a source of stress and became an act of appreciation.  This was an exercise in documenting all the things that make my subjects beautiful, unique, and fascinating.  In short, an act of love. 

 

 

 

 

 

I am so grateful to all my models.  This was an incredibly enjoyable experience.   Thank you for sitting still and being patient for me.

Happy Valentine's day.

'Tis the Season

Valentine's Day is nearly upon us.  The responses to this fact tend to fall into one of two categories. 

1) Stress verging on panic as people try to figure out what to do for their significant others, or

2) Preparing to face the holiday alone.  This can range from bleak to melodramatic. 

Although I have yet to see a solution to the first state, there is some relief for the single among us.

Enter Valentine's Day parties, where groups of single friends get together to eat chocolate, drink wine, and complain about their lives.  I've been invited to two of these gatherings, since I have quite a few single friends.

My thought is that, in the midst of all this unpleasantness, everyone could use a bit of loving-kindness.  I think that portraiture is an excellent tool for cultivating a sense of loving-kindness towards another person.  The careful examination needed to capture a person's likeness has always inspired feelings of fondness and love in me.  My intention is to sketch portraits of my fellow single Bereans with a focus on the "four qualities of love: Friendliness (metta), Compassion (karuna), Appreciative Joy (mudita) and Equanimity (upekkha)" that are cultivated during loving-kindness meditation (Pannyavaro 2014).  

I've never been particularly hung up over Valentine's Day, but I would like to try to celebrate it in some sort of positive way, rather than simply ignoring it.  I think that cultivating loving-kindness is an excellent way to do that.

Perfect Wisdom

When I was younger, I would draw everything out of my head.  It was so simple to pull complex images out of my imagination and put them on paper.  This is something that has gradually faded from my drawings, which is unfortunate.  Even though learning how to draw from life has dramatically improved my drawing ability, the raw imaginative power just isn't there any more. 

While I was flipping through my textbook, I came across a section about visualization in meditative practice (Trainor 86).  This was a new concept for me, because my initial idea of Buddhist meditation requires focusing on nothing or the breath.  The use of visualizations as a valuable technique for reaching a meditative state is something that I wanted to try.  I think that drawing actually makes this process easier, because you are creating a tangible representation of the visualized object or person.  Keeping the image in mind is necessary to successfully complete a drawing.  This also seemed like a perfect opportunity to stretch my rusty imagination.

The visualization exercise outlined in my textbook comes from the "Garland of Meditative Techniques" and is intended to connect the practitioner with divine wisdom.  It states,

"With these words one should meditate on Emptiness: 'I possess in my essence the adamantine nature which is the knowledge of Emptiness." Next one should imagine [the]... lunar disk as transformed into the Lady Prajnaparamita.  She bears a headdress of twisted hair; she has four arms and one face. With two of her hands she makes the gesture of expounding the Dharma.... In her hand she golds a  blue lotus with a prajnaparamita book upon it." (Trainor 87).

With that in mind, I set out to draw my version of the Lady Prajnaparamita (who's name means "the perfection of wisdom") while contemplating the idea of emptiness.

 It should be noted that this is a very Caucasian representation of the Lady Prajnaparamita...

One of the things that derailed my meditative experience was the fact that, without the aid of a live model, my grasp of anatomy is tenuous at best.  The addition of extra arms further complicated the process.  I had to run to the internet, and at one point my computer's web cam, in order to figure out what all her hands should look like.  My visualization technique is not quite sharp enough to keep that level of detail.  However, holding a mental image was surprisingly calming.  This was a very goal oriented session, which made it easier to tune out the rest of the world. 

The idea of emptiness was also very interesting to me.  I had always associated feeling empty with lethargy and depression.  I don't think that this is the type of emptiness that the Buddha would recommend.  Emptiness could refer to the feeling that remains once attraction and aversion have ceased.  This is not something I have ever personally experienced, but it seems like a worthy goal. 

Also, I made sure not to look up other representations of the Lady Prajnaparamita before I started drawing so that I didn't get any outside images stuck in my head.  For those of you who are interested in a more traditional representation, here you go.

Link to picture

 

(An)atman Portrait

To me, self portraits have always seemed like a quintessentially narcissistic art form.  All of the ones that I have drawn or painted throughout my life have been a necessary evil, for a class project or due to a complete lack of subject matter.  It is nice to not have to remind someone to sit still all the time.  Self portraits are a last resort, anything else would be self-absorbed, right? Right?

There is a culturally appropriate level of self-aversion that nearly everyone my age accepts without question. (I can't speak for people outside the 18-25 demographic.  One can hope that this changes with age.  I suppose I'll find out eventually).  This aversion manifests itself in ritual self-deprecation, dissatisfaction with any reminder of our physical appearance ("I look awful in that picture") and our inability to take complements at face value.  Anything less is vanity. 

From a Buddhist perspective, this is ridiculous. In terms of "things-that-cause-suffering," aversion is exactly the same as desire (Richey 2014).  It is painfully evident the kind of suffering this self-aversion causes.  The twinge of nervous guilt as I upload today's picture is testament to that.

Portrait of the artist, Saturday 1:00 AM

 As I drew this picture, I tried to focus on the ideas of atman ("self" in Sanskrit) and anatman ("non-self") and how they relate to the way I view myself as an artistic subject. When the question "Does the self exist or not?" was posed to the Buddha, he refused to answer.  This refusal indicated two things. First, holding a view of either the existence of a self or the non-existence of the self would be too extreme and fall into the category of "wrong view."  Either way, this is an ego-centric question.  Secondly, the Buddha did not feel that this question was worthwhile since the presence or absence of a "self" did nothing for the cessation of suffering (Bhikkhu 1996).  The interconnected nature of reality means that putting a strong distinction between "self" and "other" is unproductive.  

"The questions [...] are not 'Is there a self? What is my self?' but rather 'Am I suffering stress because I'm holding onto this particular phenomenon? Is it really me, myself, or mine? If it's stressful but not really me or mine, why hold on?'" (Bhikkhu 1996).

Still, the act of drawing a self portrait forces some unwanted self-contemplation.  The concept of "self" creates a gigantic road-block.  The whole process became much easier when I chose to view my reflection as nothing more than a collection of light and dark patches.  This view removes all value judgements, since it's pretty difficult to view a vaguely triangular dark spot as "bad" or "good."  It just is.   

"It is the task of meditation to dismantle this structure by penetrating the selfless nature of all phenomena" (Bodhi 2011).

Letting go of the idea of the self, even if it's just a little bit, can help with a lot of things.

Session One

Round one of contemplative sketching was a success! And by success I mean that I was present at a figure drawing session for 2.5 hours and I have some sketches.  The contemplation part was a bit more complicated.

One of the big problems about trying to be mindful and focused is that it's so easy to notice when you're actually doing it.  This, of course, causes everything to immediately fall apart.  Multiple times during the session I would suddenly think, "Wow! I haven't been thinking much recently! I'm so focused!" Then I would realize that I was thinking again and become concerned about that, then get frustrated, and so on.  And the walls come tumbling down.

However, I would consider this experience at least a 40% success.  Here are the sketches from the evening.

My theme of the evening was "Arms." The model's theme of the evening was "How many Greco-Roman sports poses can I hold for five minutes?" We worked well together.

The long pose for the evening.  My theme is unchanged, however, the model seems to be going for "Sleepy Poseidon."

The professor who runs the figure drawing sessions made an interesting comment to one of the other students.  He pointed out that the student was having some trouble and was getting distracted too easily.  The professor said something to the effect of, "You have to turn off that part of your mind, or else this won't work." The idea that you have to calm your mind in order to produce good work is something that I have heard in every art class that I've ever taken.  The reason for this is often attributed to the idea that the right side of your brain "controls creativity" while the left side "controls language and logic."  Neurologically speaking, it's a lot more complicated than that.  Both sides of the brain play a role in the visual perception, spatial reasoning, creativity, and fine motor control required for drawing as well as the language and internal monologue that can derail this process (Nielsen et al. 2013). 

Whatever the reason, I have noticed that my drawings are significantly better when my conscious mind isn't constantly butting in with opinions and criticisms.  The trick seems to be to let it just happen, which has become harder because I'm trying too hard.  My attempt at mindfulness may have actually made me worse...

The next step is to figure out what on earth I'm supposed to do with my inner monologue, especially if I can't really shut it up.  This will be the question that I will explore before I head back to the drawing board/sketch pad/whatever.