boredom and scribbling

Cecelia (not her real name) was a dual-credit student between the college and a local high school. Granted, she was young, but she was also an honor student among her peers. She had 90 minutes to complete the assignment: a single leaf. record intricate detail. use graphite. I prefaced the assignments with a standard—“we are not looking for masterpieces, just a careful seeing and recording.”

Fifteen minutes into the allotted time, she was texting. She would go back to the drawing as a kind of token of sincerity and finally, after about 30 minutes, seemed unable to bear the boredom any longer and informed me she had finished her work and needed to leave.


She handed me her sketchbook, “I’m done, wanna see it?” She had created a credible outline of the leaf and, apparently overwhelmed by the complexity, did quick child-like scribbles within the boundaries. Scribbles are not awful, just not what was assigned.


The value of this example is not in ridicule, but rather my observance of the difficulty and resistance to slowing and truly seeing. The application extends broadly.


Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed convincingly speaks of the beauty of slowness in a variety of arenas including eating, work, medicine, and sex….citing a new hunger for slowing as a “message people want to hear.” He includes Frederick Nietzsche’s detection of a growing culture “of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to get everything done at once.”


Cecelia is a fractal—a reduced-sized copy--of the whole of her surrounding culture. She is bored with what is and she scribbles.


Deliberate slowing aborts the constant movement toward things that glisten for attention. I find it distinctly uncomfortable. It feels irresponsible to disobey time or the siren call to action.But I am seeing that when I concede to slowness, there is a direct correlation to increased awareness and interest in life as it is.....and less of my own scribbling.

sentinel eyes

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
                                                                                                      ------ Pablo Picasso


“There is no other reason for drawing than the awareness of the eye awakening from its half-sleep. There is - I am convinced - no other good reason for art, all the art-popes and theories notwithstanding...”
                                                                                                          ------Frederick Franck

by david, age 5

I want to preface my affirming remarks about children and attentiveness with a disclaimer.

Armed with ample and credible personal experience I have maintained and often verbally proclaimed my cynicism about kids and those who tout their inherent loveliness and innocence. After a few short months they seem to adopt multiple behaviors that make them less than desirable dinner companions or fellow shoppers…certainly a hindrance to progress in the studio.


But with the weight (and the glory) of intimate years with small children behind me, it is easier now to see them in an unprejudiced light and to even learn from them something of what we easily abandon as we accumulate years. John Taylor says it skillfully---


Over the swinging parapet of my arm
Your sentinel eyes lean gazing, Hugely alert
In the pale unfinished clay of your infant face,
They drink light from this candle on the tree.
Drinking, not pondering, each bright thing you see,
You make it yours without analysis
And, stopping down the aperture of thought
To a fine pinhole, you are filled with flame….


In a life drawing class in Santa Fe earlier this month I was standing before a large blank page preparing to draw. Zeus, our model, was nude and in a prone position directly in front of me readied for a 30 minute pose. Barry Moser, our instructor, explained how he wanted us to approach the drawing: “Go ahead, be a voyeur for now. Take time to look at Zeus with care. Look at him as you would look at one you loved. Examine the folds, the curvatures, the light and shadow. Quiet the mind of distractions and simply gaze at him.”


Most of us do not default to this kind of seeing. It is weird. Quiet gazing is an anomaly to most of us over five. “Drinking” what is in front of us without naming, judging, or analyzing is something small children do well. Seeing well is a return to the child-gaze and alertness that energizes us as artists, as humans, “letting go of what we know to honor what exists.”(paraphrase of David Bazan’s lyrics).

the muscles of attentiveness

"How you love anything is how you love everything."
                                                                      --------Richard Rohr in The Naked Now

My original tweaking of this quote would be fitting: "How you show attention to anything is how you show attention to everything." Attentiveness, like love, is "one piece."  As I increasingly notice the unnoticeable, the ordinary, the mundane, I am developing muscles of attentiveness that spill over into the whole of life. We become the kinds of people who pay attention indiscriminately.

One of the assignments I have implemented in classes or workshops to develop these valuable muscles is asking students to draw the most boring subject in view. Don't go looking for a "good" subject, but find that "good" in what I am currently dismissing... to discover the intrinsic beauty in the least makes life a kind of adventure.

Fully developed (ing) attentiveness saves the artist from the trap of self-absorbtion since it has become, as Mr. Rohr describes, "one piece".  Our attention now includes the range of people and circumstances so integral to our lives. Practiced well, attentiveness gives to the world the same consideration it gives to the object of  its art.

momento mori

"The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living." Ellen Glasgow

Recently, I was looking for a birthday present for my mid-twenties single son and happened on some well-designed t-shirts themed with skulls.  I enjoyed the artwork, but did not purchase one because the images turned me off. My dismissive thinking took the path of classifiying these as morbid and promoting some kind of evil.

 Momemto mori: "Remember, you will die" or " Remember your mortality" in one tradition is a genre of art that is specifically created to function as a helpful reminder of our impending death and, as Ellen Glasgow helps us see, will aid us in living fully.


I had a personal "momento mori" over the weekend watching the father of my two oldest daughters succumb to a ravaging cancer. All the distractions of the daily frenzy and duties ceased in attending to that final suffering and that final sigh. A clarity formed about what is worth my attention.


Absolute attention is something we seek as artists.  We want to be free of those external and internal encumbrances that speak of hurry, intimidation, self-exaltation and a host of other insidious killers of originality and works that speak.


The  "momento mori", then, is not darkness, but actually serves to  harness those truly dark entities that keep me from creating. It paradoxically puts it all in proper order.


Maybe I will get the t-shirt for myself.

the ferns on the forest floor

“We attend, waiting, for the veil of everyday habit to fall away so that what we paid no attention to, because it struck us as so ordinary, might be revealed as miraculous.”

----Czeslaw Milosz

I have not always been interested in paying attention. Most of my life I have been a driven person and have often declared if I died at 50 I would have accomplished as much as if I died at 100. Driving life fast  is akin to living a freeway sort of existence that bypasses all the interesting places and people on those two lane roads that often run parallel to the large interstates. About ten years ago I began to loosen my grip on finding my identity in this frenetic pursuit.  This recent Change began with some good books and, as Michelangelo stated when sculpting,  "another few days and life will break through."
But I am also following a thread of attentiveness drawn from memories that reside alive in me from decades ago.

The first five years of my life I lived in Juneau, Alaska. Our home was situated at the base of a mountain across from Gastineau Channel. My dad had built most of the house. He constructed the kitchen part of it over a creek that came down off the mountain. It flowed under our kitchen floor and we could access it with a trap door. The house was surrounded by dense forest and it served as a playground for my sister and me.

In our frequent visits to the forest, the ferns that thrived there were an attraction to me. I think the reason for this is the proximity I had as a three-year-old to things short and close to the ground. They had a smell, a look, and a presence that drew my attention and gave me delight. It is the first experience of noticing and attentiveness in my memory. Attention to those ferns was a beginning that, I think, whet my appetite for more.

regaining our sight

One of my students/friends from a recent drawing class came to my house last week to show me a seed pod she had found. She enthusiastically pointed out the curious shapes, contours, and textures she was finding in that irrelevant artifact.

The small becomes large. The inconsequential takes center stage.


I have wondered why this business of drawing transcends the mechanics and principles to something much larger. John Taylor talks about the "sense of beyondness at the heart of things." I wonder if we are, in our art, being drawn to a kind of mystery that is present in seeing with a sort of third eye that sees beauty in cracked plaster,folded laundry and homely insects.

lost in wonder

This Lost in Wonder is actually the title of a book by Esther DeWaal on redisovering attentiveness. Her book is one of those few that have affected the way I live.  In it she quotes May Sarton from Journal of a Solitude:


If one looks long enough at almost anything,
Looks with absolute attention at a flower,
a stone,
the bark of a tree,
grass, snow, a cloud,
something like revelation takes place.
Something is 'given',
and perhaps that something
is always a reality outside the self.

moving my stuff

Moving is never easy.  Stuff always gets in the way making progress difficult.  I am currently moving my stuff from a website on yahoo to this blogspot. This is going to be a slow process, so keep checking back.  marty

a new beginning

"Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.".....Maria Robinson