reality – the awakened eye

the beauty beyond ideas

Posted on November 2, 2015November 2, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

A warm welcome to Eva Millauer as she joins our artisans’ gallery. I will take her advice and avoid putting her “in a box”:

I am not exactly thrilled to be put in a box as dancer, performance artist,
visual artist, film maker, poet, script writer etc, etc…
as my real movement is to meet you in the beauty beyond all of these ideas
of who we are.

As an artist and a human being, I always explore the same theme.

In fact I only work with one theme, which is not describable as a theme as it is simply the oneness in which everything manifest and un-manifest arises and changes and comes and goes.

There is an unspeakable reality beyond all ideas, identities and concepts and it is my vision to create creative spaces in which the experience and manifestion of that is allowed, supported and lived.

What we call ‘art’ can be a most wonderful gateway to a communication which is much more than what is visible as such on a canvas, in a moving body, a video or a beautiful poem. This is exactly what I feel moved to work with.

my name is love

and I live the trees

my name is love

and I live the light

my name is love

and I live the soil

my name is love

and I live the birds

my name is love

and I live the sky

my name is love

and I live you

– Eva Millauer

Sourced from Eva’s website and personal correspondence.

Please visit Eva’s page – a sparkling sense of aliveness – to view more of her creative expressions and find links to her online presence.

artisans

artisans’ gallery

the uniqueness of unnamed seeing

Posted on December 19, 2014December 19, 2014 by miriam louisa simons

The precision of naming takes away
from the uniqueness of seeing.
– Pierre Bonnard

… a short excerpt from Rupert Spira‘s book, Presence, Vol 1, with paintings by the artists he mentions …

– – –

An artist tries to represent, that is, to re-present, to present again a vision of experience that evokes its reality, to make something that has the power within it to draw the viewer into its own reality.

Pierre Bonnard: Nude in a Bathtub

That is what the French painter, Pierre Bonnard, was trying to capture: the timeless moment of perception before thinking has divided the world into a perceiving subject and a perceived object and then further sub-divided the object into ‘ten thousand things.’

And what did that vision look like in Bonnard’s view? It was a world brimming with colour, intensity, harmony and dancing with vitality. It was world in which the edge of the bath or an old wooden floorboard were given the same attention, the same love, as were the curve of a cheek or the gesture of a hand.

It was the same moment that William Blake wanted to evoke. He was once questioned, “When you see the sun rise do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?” And he replied, “Oh no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying ‘Glory, Glory, Glory is the Lord God Almighty.’”

Likewise, William Turner who is reported to have been returning home from Hampstead Heath with a painting under his arm late one evening, when a local resident stopped him and asked to see the painting. After looking at it for some time the resident remarked, “Mr. Turner, I have never seen a sun set over Hampstead Heath like that,” to which Turner replied, “No, but don’t you wish you could.”

The body and mind of the artist is the medium through which nature interprets itself to itself. It is the medium through which nature explores and realises its own identity. As Cézanne said, “I become the subjective consciousness of the landscape and my painting becomes its objective consciousness.”

– Rupert Spira

Presence: The Art of Peace and Happiness – Volume 1

Links to related pages and posts on this site:

rupert spira at the artisans’ gallery

paul cézanne

nature’s eternity – an essay on paul cézanne by rupert spira

blake’s eternal delight

artisans

artisans’ gallery

Sources of images:
Pierre Bonnard – Nude in a bathtub
William Blake – Song of Los
J.M.W. Turner – Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands
Paul Cézanne – Bend in a Forest Road

the essential and indivisible fabric of reality

Posted on May 21, 2014May 21, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

Announcing two exciting additions to the site today.

The artisans’ gallery welcomes artist, teacher and writer Jordan Wolfson, who lives in Boulder, Colorado. (What is it about Colorado? It’s strongly represented in the gallery!)

And – Jordan’s insightful and inspiring essay how painting can help to save the world, actually, has been posted as a page, with his generous permission.

Still Life with Red Tapestry X, 2013
oil on linen, 28″ x 25″

About his work, and the investigation fuelling its process, Jordan writes:

I believe it is through the identification of the self with a pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic sense of being that actual change occurs. While our identification remains within the confines of discursive thought and language our model of the world remains one of fragmentation and conflict. Language isn’t to blame – it’s just the way it works.

Actual change occurs through a shift in our identification of the self and the growing awareness of the essential and indivisible fabric of reality. It is to an investigation of this sheer presence, which is not only pre-conceptual but also resides before and between form, that my work is committed.

Visit his page at the gallery to read his entire artist’s statement and view more of his artworks.

how painting can help to save the world, actually

In this image-rich essay, I’m confident Jordan speaks for all of us who understand our practice as a passionate movement towards unity with something inconceivably larger than our programmed personality. Something that signals the end of fragmentation and disharmony by disappearing the illusory gap between the observer and the observed.

A couple of extracts:

What is presence? And how does it get associated with an object? What is the process with which material gets charged or imbued with it? How is it that a human being can take colored mud, smear it around on a piece of fabric and end up charging the materials so greatly that it resonates with vitality hundreds of years after the person is long gone? How is it that a human being can take raw material and form it in such a way that it moves our hearts and quiets our minds? And what does this have to do with saving the world? […]

We are not who we think we are. Painting carries the possibility of getting us out of our minds and into an awareness of our being. That is what occurs when we receive a painting, whether from another’s hands or from our own. The reality of our experience facing great painting, the power and force of transmission remains a mystery as long as we remain in the story of Separation. As we dare to allow our minds to enter into the story of Interbeing, painting affirms the larger truth of this new story. Its essential nature re-storys the world, reimagining who we are and where we are going. As we paint we have the possibility to not only make an object to look at, but to retell our story. […]

http://jordanwolfson.com

who sees the tree?

Posted on January 20, 2014May 21, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

Piet Mondrian: The Red Tree (Evening), 1908 - 10, Oil on Canvas

Piet Mondrian: The Red Tree (Evening) 1908 – 1910

– – –

Look outside at the sleeping tree there. Who sees the tree?

… Does a body do the seeing or does awareness, consciousness, life see it? What sees the tree? Consciousness? – or a body-centered custodian of consciousness?

Where is the tree? Fifty-seven feet removed from a body-oriented ego-container of awareness, a judge who likes or dislikes what he sees? – or is the tree within awareness? Is the seeing of the tree the activity of a separate-from-the-thing-I-see recipient-of-life, a so-many-year-old male or female pump filled organism who looks out through bloodshot eyes and answers to the name of Bill? – or could it be that it is Deity being the “seeing”?

Indeed, isn’t it just possible that Isness, Reality, God, is the seer “seeing” and being the seen? Could it just be that “seeing” itself is the identity “we” are?

Could we be Life itself rather than the recipient of it? Indeed we can! We are!

– William Samuel, The Awareness of Self-Discovery

In order to understand the true meaning of Abstract Art,
we have to conceive of ourselves as a reflex (reflection) of reality.
This means we have to see ourselves as a mirror in which reality reflects itself.
– Piet Mondrian

Image source: www.pietmondrian.info

the realization of not-two-ness

Posted on April 24, 2013May 22, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

It is [the] flash of realization of not-two-ness, that is both the centre and the endpoint of our human experience.

In every seed of every weed, in the knee-joint of a dead wasp’s leg, the structure of the Whole of Reality is laid bare for those who have eyes to see.

Image by Laurent Schwebel

Our brain filters out the overwhelming poignancy of this Structure of Reality, of the Divine, as it manifests in all that is.

The eye, however, when it awakens, sees all things as “unseparated” from itself, to speak with Eckhart*.

– Frederick Franck
The Awakened Eye

* Meister Eckhart: The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.

Photograph: Laurent Schwebel

Frederick Franck at the artisans’ gallery

seeing/drawing as meditation

the Face of faces

the 10 commandments
(Frederick Franck’s guidelines for the creative life)