Drawing : Drawing and Mindfulness: Part five: Weaving in your own story

Zen Buddhist drawing of a meditating frog

Before we get serious, I need to remind everyone that from many points of view this whole activity is very funny. Don't take yourself or this process too seriously, the point about stepping lightly is to not leave dirty boot prints all over the place. Hence the meditating frog drawing.

One of the reasons for immersing yourself into the working processes of another artist is to try and push your own ego into the background. In order to develop our sensitivity to the world and others, we need to clear a path through that dense thicket of me, me, me and accepting the fact that someone else might have an approach to life that can be of benefit is part of that process.

However at some point you will need to build into your world view an acceptance of yourself as a human being, as a process equally as valuable as anything else. Your way of being and existence is as wonderful as the processes of sky, as beautiful as the construction of a stream and as kind as the ecology of a tree. The place you find yourself in, is simply a moving point in space, a point interconnected to all other points in space and therefore to all other things, and their possible combinations and existences. You are entangled into the process of being and as your point in space moves, so does the matrix of connections with everything else. Time and gravity combine to give weight to your actions, and in many ways shape what you might in the past have called ‘intentions’ but from a different position of acceptance, see as ‘fate’ or simply the playing out of possibilities.

This stage of drawing and mindfulness simply asks you to pick out something you have already done and to repeat it, but this time to reduce it down to an essence. Then to repeat the process again and again, until you feel you have gone as far as you can. Now review all your drawings and decide which of them you have the most affinity with. Now meditate on your bond with this drawing and finally create a family of forms that emerge naturally from the processes that you have evolved in your drawing's making.

By finding a relationship with materials, drawing hopefully opens the door to a new way of being. An acceptance that other things have agency, leads to an acceptance that the paper and dyes you have been using have their own ways of being and as you learn their languages you become more conversant in the ‘touch’ of material thought. This sensitivity leads to a type of caring, a kindness towards the non-human, hopefully carried through into the rest of your life as an attitude towards others, whether people, animals, plants or inorganic materials. It hopefully also leads to the establishment of a point of view that always searches for the processes of interconnection, rather than looking for the isolated, atomised thingness of reductionist thought.

This blog is written as a series of encounters with thoughts about drawing. Thoughts are triggered by various encounters with drawings, conversations about drawing with other people, books and journal articles about drawing, conferences on drawing and exhibitions and sometimes those everyday connections with drawing that can happen at any time in any place. What ties them all together is a search for how drawing can be used to help be at one with the world. At times this can be thought of as a way to develop a spiritual response to life, at others to foster a deeper awareness of the underlying mathematical structures that underpin reality. A historical perspective can be as important to our awareness as an emotional register and this as vital as an awareness of the chemical composition of a material. As you look through various posts you will become aware that no one approach is favoured over another, philosophy and politics being as important as genre or gender. The continuing search for connections is what counts and hopefully the somewhat rambling nature of the various posts can give you an insight into how wonderful an activity drawing can be. Buddhists are very aware of how important the shaping of an attitude to life is. Buddhist belief also encompasses an awareness of the limitations of verbal language, for instance the chanting of “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” is much more to do with the sound of the words than the individual meaning of them. It is the sound and rhythm of chanting that activates the human potential and there is no word for word translation. This is about faith and practice. In repetition you begin to cultivate a state of sensitive awareness. However this does not mean that things don’t evolve. The “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” chant is made of words that have evolved out of ancient Indian and Chinese languages and are pronounced in Japanese. ‘Nam’ is from the Sanskrit, “myoho-renge-kyo” are Chinese words, the fusion of the two being “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo”. This historical fusion is often referred to as embodying a universal language, the sound of the chant being understood by all who have been inducted into Buddhist traditions. The sound is understood as one that creates a unity with the fundamental rhythm of the cosmos. This chant was developed during the 13^th century and the fusion of languages that shaped it was formed out of a poetic consciousness. The poetic consciousness is very similar to that one attained as we are attuned to the finer adjustments in a drawing. It is this type of consciousness that leads to a deeper understanding of entanglement, an activity that shapes new forms and in their shaping reveals an interconnectedness that underpins the morphing and reshaping of process. An image will hopefully arrive out of the constant making of drawings that you can return to over and over again. Each time you return to it, it should reveal new layers of connections.

This stage of drawing is also about letting go of drawing. It is not about words, it is not about drawing, it is about finding a way of experiencing a relationship with something that isn’t yourself. This relationship being something that can become a model for future conduct, something to use as you prepare food, cultivate your garden or work with other people. As you move beyond this stage, you should sense a growing relationship with the universe, an acceptance of your own being arriving alongside an acceptance of other processes of become-ing, world-ing, plant-ing, forest-ing, animal-ing, sky-ing, sea-ing, rain-ing, sun-ing, moon-ing and all those other processes of interconnection that you are part of.