In the silence of drawing
hidden, yet visible, in each face
I see the Face of faces,
see:
that the plural of man
does not exist,
is our cruelest hallucination -
see that our Oneness is infinite differentiation,
see:
that the pattern of the universe
and mine
are not-two,
that what lives in me
is the Tao
in which all lives.

THIS IS NOT WHAT I BELIEVE
BUT WHAT MY EYES
SAW ON THE WAY.

Having become
all these faces, all these bodies,
a meadow, a flower,
a night moth and a cow,
A STRANGER NO LONGER
I AM AT HOME,
BELOVED EARTH!

~ Frederick Franck – The Awakened Eye

Frederick Franck was one of my most important teachers. He taught me how to see, how to draw as though my life depended on it, and how to live. My website ‘the awakened eye’ is dedicated to him and his vision.

See also:
Frederick Franck’s to-do list

Find more info about Frederick Franck at the awakened eye website

Naturalness, spontaneity, and playfulness are all aspects of the ordinary mind that catches a glimpse of the world of things just as they are.

To live this life fully means to see all of it.

The doorway to this experience is the creative process.  Please delve deeply into it.

Give it a chance to do what it is capable of doing.  Engage it fully with the whole body and mind.

If you do, sooner or later, this limitless way of being will be your own.

It will never make sense, and you’ll never be able to explain it to anybody, but you will experience it, and by so doing, you will make it real.
~ John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity

Homage to John Daido Loori, who left us on Friday. Gratitude for all that he shared with us as a fully human being and taught us as a Zen Master. And for his inspiring insights into the creative process, shared in his books and revealed in his exquisite photography.

For more on Daido Roshi, please visit his pages at THE AWAKENED EYE website:  the zen of creativity and john daido loori

photo: Floating Rocks copyright John Daido Loori

It utterly overwhelms the imagination to consider the size and complexity of our cosmos with its billions of galaxies and trillions of planetary systems, all partaking in a continuous flow of creation. How can it be so vast, so subtle, so precise, and so powerful?

Metaphorically, we inhabit a cosmos whose visible body is billions of light years across, whose organs include billions of galaxies, whose cells include trillions of suns and planetary systems, and whose molecules include an unutterably vast number and diversity of life-forms. The entirety of this great body of being, including the fabric of space-time, is being continuously regenerated at each instant.

Scientists sound like poets as they attempt to describe our cosmos in its process of becoming. The mathematician Norbert Wiener expresses it this way:  ”We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves; whirlpools of water in an ever-flowing river.” Physicist Max Born writes, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.” Physicist Brian Swimme tells us, “The universe emerges out of an all-nourishing abyss not only 12 billion years ago but in every moment.”

~ Tom McFerran

I dug out my Zen and Taoist texts, poked around online encyclopedialand, and found that Mu and Ku are Japanese words with – to the uninitiated – apparently similar meaning.

Mu: lit. nothing.  Space, emptiness, clearness, transparency.

Ku: lit. sky, space, mouth.  Three-dimensional void, sunyata, emptiness.

Wu is a Chinese Taoist word.  Lit. not have, without.  Commonly used to indicate not-being, creative quietude, letting-be.  Not too far out of step with Mu and Ku, it seems to me.

Then I looked up Lu.  Unsurprisingly it’s a shortening of Louisa, and guess what?  It means famous warrior and light.  I don’t know about the warrior bit, but I love the light. 

And I love the way my work teaches me all I need to know.

Lu.  (220 x 220)  Detail from scroll.  (980 x 355)
torn khadi papers, stainless steel gauze, acrylic paints, lurex threads

How do you pull a name out of the wordosphere to title a work that has no conceptual basis? Often artists resort to “Untitled” or a cluster of letters and numbers that would look more at home inside a computer’s database. I’ve resorted to using “Untitled” a handful of times, but mostly I find that the work will tell me its name – and its story too – if I am patient and empty. The scrolls that I’m posting details from at present reeled their names off like tiddlywinks as soon as they had found their format – ie, the kakemono or scroll. Mu. Ku. Wu. And Lu. Hmmm, thought I, what means this?

Ku.  (220 x 220)  Detail from scroll.  (980 x 355)
torn khadi papers, gauze, acrylic paints, lurex threads

I’ve been pottering away with color and texture, dyes and pigments, paper and textile, for almost half a century.  Mostly incognito, outside the commercial circuit.  And by great good fortune, with astonishing students to guide me.

Two things have driven my practice.  First and foremost, an addiction to the mysterious movement of creativity as it takes over and renders me (artist-designer-me) redundant.  Then, and this is a flow-on from the former, inquiring into what steps – if any – can be taken to invite, encourage, cajole or coerce that movement to come and play.

Now that I’m longer in the tooth it’s obvious that my preoccupation with a kind of religious experience – which manifested for me in the studio – was a crucial part of my wider search for non-dual understanding.

My life took me down the neti-neti superhighway.  I ended up with teachers like Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta Maharaj and Wei Wu Wei, who unpicked my felted fantasies with their ruthless questions.  And as far as the specific topic of creativity was concerned, it was David Bohm who was my mentor – not a visual artist, but a physicist!

This little preamble is my way of explaining that I’ve always been more interested in what sabotages or prevents creative working and thinking, than defining what it might be.  I now suspect there’s no computable answer to the latter.

Over the years I’ve experimented with many activities to see which ones might be effective antidotes to the creative constipation we call ‘block’.  When I’m in a painterly mood there’s nothing better than simply getting out the tubes and mixing hues.  Simply mixing, mind you.  No plans, no designs.  I just mix; I make tonal ladders and color ladders.  I simply worship and celebrate color without any agenda.  By the time a morning (afternoon, day, sleepless night) has passed, I’m overflowing with ideas.  Color does that to me. 

If the painterly mood is awol I tear things up.  Sometimes I tear up ho-hum work and weave it into – whatever.  Sometimes I tear up lovely hand-made khadi papers from India, or washi and tenguji from Japan.  Then I collage them down, avoiding figurative temptations, just overlapping and juxtaposing.  Sometimes the fragments are already colored, sometimes not.  But I find they will always ask for light and shade so out come the tubes.  Color goes on.  Breathstrokes might float across the surface.  Stitches too. 

The names come much later.  As E H Gombrich always insisted, “Making always precedes matching.”

Mu.  (220 x 220)  Detail from a scroll.  (980 x 355) 
torn Khadi papers, acrylic paint, light-reflective paint, gauze

Danah Zohar writes, in her book The Quantum Self, that creativity is the dynamic of unfolding consciousness. If, as she proposes, the unfolding consciousness of reflecting human beings forms the bridge between the contemporary world with its fragmentation, alienation, inhumanity, and the “reconciled universe” of coherence, integration and meaning, then it is clear that we need to stop ignoring the beckoning call of creative acting and thinking. We need to start asking some “What if …?” questions about what we presume creativity to be, and why we aren’t able to experience it in a sustained way in every aspect of our lives. There are few better ways of doing that than by engaging in practical encounters with the processes involved in looking, seeing and making.

creating from wonder brings to synthesis all the experiences we’ve had as we moved through the previous 8 books in the empty canvas – wondering mind series. It closes the circle. It brings us back to the wonder of perception and to the space in which that-which-is can speak. But we arrive there richer in every way – richer in insight, in technique, and in our ability to play with the unfamiliar. The empty canvas is our lover, at last.

~

We have thought hard, questioned hard, and played hard. Now we can bring our new perceptions and perspectives to larger projects – projects that unfold from the activities of the previous chapters. We have established some basic ways of looking and working that we can apply to themes, without being blinded by their abstract qualities or our notions of what we ought to do.

There are fourteen projects in creating from wonder. How you choose to approach them is up to you. They don’t follow any sequence, but you’ll notice that they each relate, in some way, to one (or more) of the previous books. You could start at the first one and work your way through the lot, or simply pick and choose those that have some special appeal. Any of these projects make good workshop activities – they can be explored as deeply as you are inclined to dig, and since there are no ideal outcomes, the need for an authoritative leader is redundant.

The projects: 

1  unfold your myth
2  veritable vestments
3  Buddha-body
4  the heart of the story
5  animated grey matter
6  a sanctuary for the secret senses
7  playing with process
8  metaphorically speaking
9  objets trouvées
10  deconstructing and recycling
11  shape-shifting
12  quantum realities
13  culture and creativity
14  the three questions

This is the final of three excerpts from creating from wonder – one of the empty canvas – wondering mind series of e-books.  From time to time I’ll post a project from this e-book, but in the meantime you are welcome to download it for free at the wonderingmind website.

Marvel and wonder go hand-in-hand, and their offspring is true learning. One of the most exciting things about the kind of activity that occurs in the art room, (the educating art room), is that it is firmly grounded in experimental processes. We are, as novice or professional artisans, deeply involved in both wonder and wondering.

Questions are the life-blood of the artisan, and the prime question in any artisan’s mind is “What if …?”  This is a question that makes many parents and teachers wince.  At the same time, it’s the one that generates exploration and experimentation in the fields of science, sports, philosophy – what area of human endeavor can be excluded from its penetrating, “But perhaps…”?

The “What if …?” of wondering mind is the fuel for any investigation into creativity.

Blind Men on a Log Bridge
By Hakuin Ekaku
(The Gitter Collection)

Hakuin’s painting is a beautiful depiction of the creative process.

Two blind travellers are crossing a river on a bridge made from a floating log. Imagine the courage, the focus, the risk! Arms reach out to probe for stability, feet follow one tentative step at a time. Balance is maintained, but only by ruthless presence in the moment. What if a wave rolls the log ? What if it is flooded over? What if someone is approaching? What if it’s too short, too narrow, too rotten?

The blind men just keep going.

This is so often the way we feel when faced with the empty canvas. We struggle to find a foothold. We feel we haven’t a clue as to what we’re doing or where we’re going.

Well, the good news is that this is exactly how we will feel, if genuine creative expression is our priority.

This is the second of three excerpts from creating from wonder – one of the empty canvas – wondering mind series of e-books.  You can download it for free at the wonderingmind website.

wonder is a wonderful word to wonder about:
wonderful – wondrous – a wonder – with wonder – to wonder – wondering – to do wonders – wonderland – wonderment – wonder-worker – wonderstruck…

We can talk about wonder and wondering in so many ways – it’s one of those English words that baffle foreign language students.  We call something ‘a wonder’ when it is an astonishing thing or accomplishment like the Seven Wonders of the World, or when it is miraculous like the birth of a babe.  It is also the “emotion excited by the perception of something novel and unexpected, or inexplicable.”  And sometimes this emotion of astonishment can be “mingled with perplexity or bewildered curiosity.” (Shorter Oxford Dictionary)  And again, it’s the state of mind in which these emotions are held.  When we observe something marvelous, wonder-full, we are filled with wonder, which is like being infused with awe.

But then we sometimes say “I wonder…” and there is a shift in meaning.  To simply say, “I wonder…” usually implies doubt.  Yet to preface a phrase with “I wonder if…” is to imply curiosity.  In French, one says “Je me demand…” – I ask myself.  Then it implies that I’m going to explore, to inquire in and of myself about something.  The way I’ve used the word wondering in this book embraces all these meanings.  For to wonder in the sense of exploring, with doubt and curiosity, is to never be far from the wonder of marvel.  Perhaps the greatest wonder of all is that we have the ability to wonder, to reflect.  And to have that capacity as a natural by-product of being alive is simply amazing.

Marvel and wonder go hand-in-hand, and their offspring is true learning.

This is the first of three excerpts from creating from wonder – one of the empty canvas – wondering mind series of e-books.  You can download it for free at the wonderingmind website.

hand of suttee
Varanasi, India

640 x 510
painting, collage, gilding
burning, wrapping

canvas board, wooden frame, bindis,
henna template, key, gold thread,
gauze bandages, gold leaf, nails,
acrylic paints

On the funeral ghats beside the Ganges in Varanasi one sees handprints left by the women who, while very much alive, joined their deceased spouse on the funeral pyre.
I’m told that this practice – suttee – is outlawed in India. But that it still happens.