Embrace insignificance

It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the universe. If you take these statistics as facts and add to them the issue that like most of my peers, I enjoy the illusion that everyone cares about what I am doing; you have a paradox. The conundrum being that self consciousness works in such a way that it causes me to believe that I am very important. This makes it hard to even think about how insignificant I actually am and makes me respond immediately to any situation that tends to suggest I am actually doing something of significance. Therefore I don't just 'like' likes on social media, or in everyday exchanges with others, I can begin to crave for them. 
I have in an earlier post pointed to the research done by professor Yi Zhou, who discovered that, "just one standard deviation increase in narcissism, (size of an artist's signature) increased the market price of a work by an average of 16%, and increased the auction house estimates by about 19%". A fact that further reinforces the feeling that if we are not seen to be significant players, if we don't believe in ourselves, we are literally 'worthless'. 
This situation can reinforce in the majority of us a feeling of low self-esteem, whereby our self conscious selves are torn between the reality of insignificance and the illusion of seeking some sort of fame or recognition for what we do. I would argue this is where drawing can be really useful. It allows us to embrace insignificance and use it to communicate to others how wonderful the world is. As we do this, it can also help us to get past those desires for affirmation from our peers. 

I have already looked at how drawing can be used to help develop a state of mindfulness. Five posts were put up that were designed to be worked through one after the other, as a way to achieve some sort of harmony with the world, but you do need to dedicate a fair amount of time to the suggested activities if you are to get any benefit from those posts. This post is an attempt to look at the issue of mindfulness in another way. 

Anonymous (late 15th century) St Jerome in Penitence, after Antonio Pollaiuolo  

Estimated sale price £80

I think the print above is really fascinating. You have an actual landscape, represented by ships and a harbour entrance brought together with an imaginary scene from the bible, of St. Jerome in a desert wilderness. The two spaces, real and imaginary, being pushed one against the other, with no attempt to suggest. gradual change. Various scales of representation are used within the same image, size constancy being more to do with importance than perspectival spatial location. The invention of graphic signs for things such as grass or water or hair, is a very important aspect of the image's texture and again there is little attempt to account for differences in foreground and background texture. Powerful gestures are used to highlight the emotional state of the main character; St Jerome's distress, is echoed in the figure of the crucified Christ and the lions fighting. Compositionally everything revolves around the figure on the cross, its strong vertical stabilising the visual rotation. You can spend quite some time with this image and the longer you do the more you can sink down into its self enclosed world, a world with its own laws, but ones that the more you engage with them, constantly reveal new possibilities. 
The fact that we don't know who the artist is does no harm to any appreciation of the image, in fact it helps us to see past the 'great artist' barrier. I used to teach engraving on copper plate and so I am also very aware of the craft behind the making of the plate from which this image was printed. The 14th century German theologian Meister Eckhart stated, “When the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.” You can step into this image and become fused with Saint Jerome and his desert experience, you can get lost in the various ways that the artist has built this image, an image that slowly engraves itself into memory; its formal impossibilities making the mythic possible; kneeling in the company of lions, being no more difficult than sailing the seas or reading a book.
There is a rhythm to the work of engraving, as you rock and twist the graver, a rhythm is built into the spacing and arrangement of the lines that are cut; look carefully at the angled marks that are clustered together in order to make tonal patches and you will be able to imagine the plate engraver pushing the graver over and over again into the copper, until enough lines have been cut to hold the ink that creates its dark patches. Cutting an engraving is hard work and in order to have the necessary level of control, years of practice are needed. In looking closely at the print, gradually the ghost of the engraver emerges, we feel the presence of its making, each line a frozen action, each image a thought form. A human being is affecting us from a distance, this small piece of paper holding within it something of great spiritual worth, of far more value than the £80 it was put on sale for. 

A long time ago I was awarded an art prize at school and I asked for and received for the prize a book on Indian Painting. In that book I learned that the compositional structure of certain paintings was based on how ragas were composed in Indian classical music. This opened a doorway for me that I have ever been grateful for and since that time I have had a fascination with Indian Art and have realised over time that it has many other doorways into understanding the world, perhaps even more so, than Western art forms.

In the 17th Century in Rajasthan abstract Tantric paintings were made in response to certain religious texts. Painting was at this time and place regarded as a meditation exercise and once made these abstract images were often given as gifts. Their function was to help others also meditate. In this respect they could be seen as operating in a similar way to the icon, except they didn't need to be housed in or sanctified by the church, or they could be looked at in comparison the the work of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, who worked hard herself to develop a body of work that could be used as a doorway into spirituality.  

Hilma af Klint's notebook

These images below are all taken from the publication 'Tantra Song - Tantric Painting from Rajasthan' and they are both beautiful and yet rather insignificant in their modesty. We will never know the names of the people who made them, and the people who made them would not expect anyone to acknowledge them. They are gifts to the world, small fragments of meditation on paper, made by people who were mystics rather than artists, people who embraced their insignificance and offered their thoughts on paper as a courtesy to others.

17th Century Rajasthan Tantric paintings

Hopefully this introduction to the work of Tantric artists will inspire and help contextualise an alternative way of thinking about art, especially for those of you who have worried about the meaning of your work and whether or not it can effect change. Anonymity is not the same as uselessness, your quiet meditations and small drawings may for others be an entry into something wonderful. 

See also: 

Indian aesthetics
Uncertain certainty
Drawing and spirituality 
Artist's signatures
Abstraction, mathematics, metaphor and creation
The anonymous drawing project