Category: Art as Meditation

Art as Meditation, Drawing as Meditation

Interviewing people who meditate, it is always a joy to hear of how others are successfully tapping into or living with (or as) the divine. Creative artists have a special relationship with source and convey these experiences through works of art. Most find some form of meditative space where habitual thought takes a backseat to awareness and the joy of creation. Enjoy these artist interviews featuring art and drawing as meditation—

Art as Meditation, Drawing as MeditationDrawing as Meditation – Sketching as Meditation – with Van
“When I am drawing I don’t think that I am consciously alone. Nor that I am conversing with anyone. Rather both those concepts are contrary to the event. I’m either in between these states of consciousness, or without them altogether… or as you have termed it I am not “I” but an “acausal witness” to the event.”

Painting and Art as Meditation – with Yvonne
“When it finally comes to painting, I sometimes get into a *pull*, my hands choose the colors without my mind involved. The brush moves on the paper and very often I can’t *remember* afterward how the forms got to the paper. I guess the meditative aspect is the being totally in the Now— there is no room for anything else but the Now.”

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Art as Meditation– No-Mind, Meditative States, Color

— Artist Interview with Yvonne Lautenschläger, Part One—

In this two part interview with artist and painter Yvonne Lautenschläger, she reveals her approach to art and creativity as a channel— as well as how she experiences no-mind and innocence in the present moment as she paints.

Meditation How: Would you call the space that you get into when you paint meditative?

Yvonne: In most cases, yes. There is no time then and I hardly think. Last night I wrote this:

*Who paints?*

*That which is painting through me*
*is innocent, unlogical and pictorial*
*it juggles the paint brush*
*plays with the colors *
*and finally lets me designate the outcome*

Meditation How: I love the poem. Innocence is so important. As much as I want to resist asking you to break down this experience further to respect the brevity and beauty of this poem, I still would like to hear more about the innocence, the absence of logic, and in particular the “letting you designate the outcome”. Let’s begin with your entrance into the meditative state. You obviously get the necessary material together, but then what happens. The more detail in terms of sensation and awareness the better.

Yvonne: First let me say, unfortunately I was never able to paint out of the blue. I need a model/draft. I see something (photo, something in a magazine, rarely places outside) and at once *know* I want to and will paint this. The extreme case was about 10 years between *seeing* and actually painting it. The reason why I say this is, that even this *knowing* of the picture inside of me and *thinking* about it, imagining it from time to time, has meditative aspects. Somehow like being pregnant and already feeling an intimate relationship. Being *still* together.

Art as Meditation No-Mind

When it finally comes to painting, I sometimes get into a *pull*, my hands choose the colors without my mind involved. The brush moves on the paper and very often I can’t *remember* afterward how the forms got to the paper. I am not a professional artist, never learned any technique, there are always *faults* in my pictures, but nevertheless I always ask myself *How did I do that??* I guess the meditative aspect is the being totally in the Now— there is no room for anything else but the Now.

Meditation and Artists

Meditation How: Who can know “why” we do things? Still, do you feel that part of the draw to this process (beginning with the compelling image) is the power of this meditative state— the being so utterly present in the now? Also, do you think there is something going on with the nature of the images, archetypes, for example—or symbols for rites of passage?

Yvonne: Oops, sorry, I don’t get the meaning of this *or symbols for rites of passage*??

Continue with Artist Interview with Yvonne Lautenschläger, Part Two

Art as Meditation- Van Huebner’s Extended Biography

—Biography of Van Huebner—Go to Van’s Interview

There’s an awful lot of reading and thinking that started back then, in the early eighties: basically, I had an artists’ crisis I called it, for lack of a better word. I had just gone to a lecture by Rudolf Arnheim after his book Power of the Center came out. I instantly threw aside art for art’s sake and went on this quest for something more meaningful than regurgitating representational images. I was all about “Visual Thinking,” to use Arnheim’s phrase… but, also I was disgusted with how shamefully dependent the visual arts were on plundering the earth for the sake of Investors and the consumer.

Anyway, Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge too is in there. But you have to think visually about this burgeoning of my new intent as a non-artist. You won’t understand it otherwise. Together these two Authors, then – though there were many others, too – can kind of illustrate my consciousness, though their influence was not a philosophical undertaking for me, not a linear argument I was learning to express. I was reading the shape in their thought! And this I continue to do, by the way.

Art as Meditation

Arnheim, ironically left me with this sense of their being a core we are always drawn to; and Foucault – Foucault was always throwing these parentheticals at you, and talking about this place between objects, asking the reader to take “rash” steps to find this non-center place of origins… So, to lamely cut this short and rely on typographical symbols, here’s Arnheim: # or maybe * and here’s Foucault: ( ) or better yet I saw this: )(

Forgive me for making this so overlong, but it can’t be helped. There is no short understandable version of the “how I became an artist.” In fact, in school I completely skipped over any acceptance of the concept of trying to become anything. At first I was saying I was already an artist and just wanting to get better at it. Then suddenly I was saying I’m not an artist, I’m just trying to get better at seeing.

Today, it’s as if I stumble around with blinders on because everything is so painful to observe. Finding an available moment to draw fairly saves me from oblivion.

Read Van’s Meditation Interview.

Art as Meditation- Emotional States, Drawing and Thought

—Interview with Van Huebner, Part Five—
Go to Part One of Van’s Interview on—
Drawing as Meditation- Art as Meditation.

Meditation How: Okay, so now I have a few more. One is regarding the word “error”— just wondering if you meant “area”… The second question is if you could describe (rather than your intent) your emotional state… joyous, manic, and ideally not just adjectives but the emotional process as you draw and meditation deepens as you draw. In addition, is there a sense of culmination or completion, or does it just diffuse?

Van: Ooo, great questions. Let’s see. No, to the first; I did mean “error.” On the subject of “emotional states” I guess I’d have to say it is a “calm”. In real-time our emotions are in flux, right, and kind of connected to the outside stimuli. When I’m drawing, or at least in the middle of this process, I feel detached—yet, I’m on a high plateau of calm. I’m not sure that answers well enough that part of your question… but, it also occurs to me that I do feel a slow sense of closure, or maybe a better phrase for it, would be landing.

The product, however, does not always give me satisfaction; but the process does; always – even when “I” intrude upon the event feeling frustrated by a particular difficulty, I can get back to the plateau pretty easily. And oddly, when the matter of a “likeness” in a portrait is at hand and becoming successful, this plateau is that much more unstable – I can feel the ego trying to jump onto the stage for moment and I have to ward him off. Regardless, I don’t always feel a sense of culmination, either. Especially with portraits, and maybe for the above reason – that the ego tries to “take credit” for the product.

For the stuff that just comes out of my head there’s never any question about culmination because at the outset, there’s little intention to represent and therefore it’s all no more meaningful than as you mentioned using the restroom. Sorry for the lack of brevity. Thought I’d send an image to illustrate the combination of portrait and manicgram. I’ve created virtually nothing of my own in Washington. I did work as a designer for Christine Alexander for a very brief period; but beyond that, all my visual thought has remained just that. I did continue to fill a common book journal and began to theorize passionately about visual thinking. Here are some examples of drawings and artwork.

Meditation How: These are all great. I think I have what I need. Thank you for interviewing.

Van: Thank you.

About Van: Van studied at Wayne State University, the College for Creative Studies, and the University of Washington, Seattle. He’s participated in only one showing of his work which was about 10 years ago at a fund-raiser for a small theater group in Hollywood, CA. called the “Non-Prophet Hatching Co.” Currently he lives in Tacoma, Washington where he continues to refuse to take part in the subversion of the art market: i.e., he does not sell his work. He provides it freely online for anyone to see at sites like www.myspace.com/arbiforum. He has several blogspot.com blogs through Google:
The Neuroboros, Lingual Pond, Involuted Frontier, and Reelin’ in the Real.

Read Van’s Extended Biography.

Drawing as Meditation- Art as Meditation, Consciousness

—Interview with Van Huebner, Part One—

In this five part interview Van speaks about drawing as meditation, sketching as meditation, numinous space, and egoless artistry. We discuss art in general as well as absolutes, wholeness, and freedom. Towards the end we tackle the subjects of non-thinking and non-knowing in creativity.

Meditation How: Would you consider your drawing or sketching a form of meditation?

Van: Gesture drawing could be said to be the beginning of my drawing as meditation. One was expected to ignore the contours and points, but rather follow the energy of the figure to generate the lines, and quickly resolve it too. This led me to a love of gesture as a finished product as some of my gestures really satisfied me. I think the bulk of my first manicgrams (as I called them) appeared about 1981-1982. Then the manicgrams resurfaced as oil pastels in the late 90’s in Los Angeles. Almost all of the manicgrams were done in the buff— that is, I was naked.

Meditation How: What prompted you to do them naked?

Van: Pretense to primal intent, you could say. I had also composed a “prayer” to Pan early on which I would utter. The nakedness stuck but the pretense evaporated—so did the “prayer.”

Meditation How: So this was definitely a form of meditation as it brought you deeper clarity and a sense of original nature or primal nature?

Van: Yes. Evidence to explore: Everything not part of the subject or process is usually successfully tuned out; a different level of consciousness: figure drawing (naked body) does not cause sexual excitement.

Meditation How: I’m trying to follow this. The reason you strip down is to eliminate distraction in some way? Does it make you more vulnerable and so more in touch with things in general?

Van: I don’t strip much anymore, because I don’t have the same intent to waken Pan… Pan was my way of dealing with fear, but the nakedness was mostly to eliminate the feeling of human devices to shield from nature… insecurity… drawing that way was therefore more than meditation, it was an opening up of numinous space, awe of origins.

Drawing as Meditation, Meditative Art

Meditation How: Tell me what numinous space means. Also, you mentioned figure drawing and nudity. Were you drawing yourself?

Van: “Numinous Space” from Erich Neumann’s Origins of Human Consciousness. I was referring to space experienced without self-consciousness, the ego, reflection, and therefore wanting to come as close as possible to an animal response to stimuli, yet set out to find a new human awe of the world.

To refer back to the rest of the last question about figure drawing and nudity: I’ve not stripped down in a long time. Nor did I do it for all my work. I only did it when I was doing my manicgrams. I worked fast and hard then too. Often hard enough my hands were bruised because I would beat on the picture to get a high sheen from the oil pastel without using a spray fixative.

Meditation How: Would you say that you were successful in this opening up?

Van: Not really. I set my sites way too high. But I do think I was onto something…that perhaps our aesthetic, scientific and spiritual attitudes seem to be converging; that this could be some kind of evolutionary start of a new consciousness akin to the shamanic aspiration to heal in every sense/domain—a kind of “triattitude” I used to call it.

Meditation How: So what is going on now? And where do you find the most elevated experiences in terms of awareness and something of bliss? Is it still with drawing?

Continue with Interview with Van Huebner, Part Two