Waking Up Visually As an artist, I explore consciousness visually. On picking up my first paint brush fifteen years ago what fascinated me, even more than the flowing paint, was the sense that I had fallen into the realm of soulful awareness. I’ve been exploring the relationship between image and consciousness ever since. I’ve noticed images tend to bypass the brain and go straight to the heart. I’ve found that the heart is the eye of consciousness. I’ve also found that whether you create you own image or spend a quiet moment with a heart-felt image someone else created, your heart opens. You see more clearly.
At first I painted because it was a way to become aware of my own interior world. I also began to meditate. Meditation and art taught me to see
both the richness of my interiority and the poverty of my typical perceptions. I’d wake up each morning with a vague sense of an image
accompanied either by quiet joy or low grade confusion. Before getting out of bed I’d sketch a little and write a few words and all the while I’d
watch myself. I realized that what I wanted to know was, “What is this quiet joy?” or “What is this low grade-grade confusion?”
To answer these questions I began to write cinquains. A cinquain is a five line poem, something like haiku. The first words I wrote each morning usually didn’t want to fit into the cinquain structure. However, I noticed that if I obediently wrote whatever came next, no matter how many revisions were necessary, gradually the words fell into the container of the cinquain and simultaneously I would touch into a felt sense of knowingness. When I awoke with a vague sense of joy, on completing the cinquain, even on challenging days I would simply know I was joy. When I awoke with confusion, on completing the cinquain, the confusion would loosen and I’d have a sense of settled knowingness. Cinquain completed, I’d have breakfast. Then I’d create an image either on watercolour paper, acrylic canvass or on the computer. That process felt similar to the cinquain process. I’d listen, feel the feelings, and be obedient to nudges about adjusting areas of the painting until I could feel the image resolve itself into settled knowingness. I digitalized my paintings and embedded the cinquains in them. In the beginning, I was passionate about painting quiet joy and it wasn’t so much fun painting through confusion. Now, I welcome confusion. I’ve noticed that it indicates that my conditioning has clouded my perception and if I keep with the process sooner or later I’ll recognize the misperceptions and the conditioning will fall away. Now, my deepest passion is to see clearly. So I’ve painted my way through a plethora of beliefs, traumas, preferences and hang-ups.
I’ve come to see that to wake up means to see through my conditioning to the point where I can live grounded in the felt sense of quiet joy and
love that all of us are at the core of being. That joy and love is the deepest reality. I want to live from that awareness twenty-four seven.
The well intentioned conditioning of my parents, teachers, religion and culture can cloud my vision so that I don’t always see the perfection that I am deep inside. To live from an awakened, enlightened state means to look with compassion at both what clouds my vision and at the perfection beneath the clouds. When the clouds and the perfection become integrated in me I can no longer tell the difference between the two. This feels like a cinquain falling into completion or a painting resolving.
For a long time, even though I sold my paintings, I was primarily painting for myself. Then a friend who followed my work said , “You know, I’d like to have an image of my own interiority to hang on my wall but I can’t paint.” So I married guided imagery techniques to my counselling training and now I support individuals as they visit their interior places after which I create an image and cinquain for them. Usually I do this using a forty minute phone call. I maintain the copyright on these digital images but the individual is free to print their own copy, use it as a screen saver or, have it reproduced as a giclee print and hang it as art.
These days it is great fun to create images of others’ interiority using the forty minute phone call. I’m also creating portfolios of about 24 images each that explore themes like What Gratitude Really Is, Coming Home to Your Heart, Living Into All-Is-Well, and Is Ours a Dog-Eat-Dog World? I’m working at making these available as digital downloads as well as in hardcopy. My aim is to do with images what others have done with words in pointing people in the direction of enlightened awareness.
I know that a little quiet time with an image or, a series of images, can go a long way in opening ones heart and in the process the scales of conditioned perception fall away revealing infinite love, joy and perfection.
