Awakening the senses - meditation and painting

I just came back from a weekend in New York with Sokuzan Robert Brown. We spent most of the time talking about sense perceptions, and he led us in a series of exercises to awaken the awareness of the senses.

"Let the senses lead," he kept saying, and backed it up with various methods of noticing where the awareness goes when focusing on certain things - what happens to sight perception of the room when one has just put a bit of salt on the tongue, for example.

Then he instructed us on ways of seeing paintings, letting the awareness travel to assigned ideas (dark, triangular, red, top left, etc) without ever moving your eyes from the center.

The result of this last was a kind of amped up version of many Josef Albers exercises, or the measuring, drawing and weighing sketches I have always done of paintings I liked in museums.

I came back uncertain of what I was going to paint, so I just went over old ground.

Different than the last one...


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