The Dream in the Dream in the Dream
Learning to draw and paint trains the eye and mind to recognize patterns. The dance across the page, the vertical lines and relationships between shadows and light… the movement of attraction and attention to a scene as it unfolds on the paper….
My formal training for all it’s worth was to see. Look at things. Observe. Take note. This is dovetailed with the decernment of focusing in on the smallest of details and pulling so far back as to see the patch work patterns of larger connections and textures like the view from an airplane window. These perspectives are like the dream worlds created with vivid imagination yet they are also what is real and presented in every unfolding moment of the day. The eyes take them in as tiny inputs and impulses that are gathered and synthesized to become the conscious and subconscious motivations of risk and assessment.
I am a bit obsessive about visual patterns. It’s kind of like an alphabet of images and information that in my mind lay out a cyclical story that keeps repeating. My eyes and mind are drawn to the news feed and the daily routines and interactions that are becoming the new normal. The political discourse at this time in this country is a repeating pattern. My mind recognizes the signs and shifts…. 1930s Germany, Tibet and China, Cambodia, Argentina, Guatemala… Egypt… just to name a few. The patterns of disruption, corruption, lies, guns and violence…. the erosion of liberties. The slow motion collision of people in disbelief being mangled by some thing so out of context to their lives that they stand stunned as it crushes then. Without any resistance or they have be distracted by a false outrage as the waves engulfs them and they drown in their blindness.
To balance this intense reality my mind seeks beauty. The rest of the world. The stuff between. The flowers, trees, the clouds, starry skies and moon… these things are the threads of a cosmic pattern. They weave dreams of a reality I only see small glimpses of during my brief consciousness time here. My awareness of it grandeur is not lost with the knowledge of a desperate political power struggle. Life is the messy and difficult journey. We are born into this to find meaning. The choice is not one thing over another. It is the awareness and action to respond to all that is presented with a commitment to make the world a better place.
The patterns show the interconnectedness of everything. There isn’t a vacuum that insulates one world, reality, dream or perspective…. All things condense and fold into the experience we have directly and independently…. what we control( if we can) is our responsibility and actions as things directly engage with us. A line across the page, we create what we draw and focus on.
Brain Tangles & Lines on a Page
Drawing is like unrveling a ball of yarn. The fibers and neurons of the frontal cortex loosen and the image impulses travel down the back of the neck, through the arm and then tranfer out in to the fingers that guide the pencil over the paper. The eyes fix on the unfolding image send reactions, and visual cues back to the brain for further responses.
A drawing emerges that tells the story of a person, place or thing. Drawing stitches the dream into the flat plane of dried fibers. The lines dance and interact to stretch the dimesions of time and form. Drawing is a dance. Drawing is the eststic moment of energy generating visual complexity and beauty.
The line is a passage… the pathway for energy falling out of a wand on to the infinite page…. line apon line entangle to create the universe.
Shaman @ Large 