Meditation Sketches

… And throughout, remember that what is most important here pertains not to me, but to you: What is your mystery? Might you authentically explore and sound your depths, your singularity through Art? Whether or not it is comprehensible to any other being! 

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A preliminary question: is ‘Art’ primarily a matter of technical mastery and execution, or is it fundamentally the incarnation of soulful inspiration and concept?

Like many truly important questions, the answer depends on who you are. In this essay, I will share my personal answers to both questions: from whence comes Art, and who am I? And as we share, perhaps you will discover some important answers of your own?

Meditation Sketches

I began a serious meditation practice in March of 2005. Six years later, with no artistic practice whatsoever throughout my fifty-nine years, I was moved to create two meditation pencil sketches, one rather abstract, and the other more representational, if not ‘realistic.’

To be kind, one might say both sketches reflect my technical immaturity. Born in 1952, I had never sketched anything outside of elementary school art class, which I very much disliked. Indeed, many would classify the execution below as ‘child art,’ and frankly, many children if not most can draw better than I.

And yet … These primitive sketches were, and two years later still are, enormously gratifying and meaningful. Each is profoundly rooted in my deepest, most authentic self, and just gazing at either today still transports me to a mystical, ineffable state of mind. 

So while I can’t entirely articulate what these sketches evoke for me, I will try, whatever the failure of language.

And throughout, remember that what is most important here pertains not to me, but to you: What is your mystery? Might you authentically explore and sound your depths, your singularity through Art? Whether or not it is comprehensible to any other being!

My Trailer Window Today

Let’s start with the less abstract, more representational meditation sketch “My Trailer Window Today.”

The seated subject is me, meditating in front of a window at the east end of our trailer. I am finally back home for good, having returned one year ago from Chicago, where I had worked eleven years in exile, of economic necessity. But home now, inside, looking out ... At mature spruce trees I had planted from seedlings fourteen years ago. At a large brush pile I recently cut from the bank of a hill, invisible here, twenty yards to the north; evidence of the prolific, generative, and mysterious force of nature. Beyond are sky, sunlight, clouds, weather; wind is manifest in the boughs, and in the closer tall, overgrown grass. Birds flit by, sometimes seen, sometimes only their shadow. Dragonflies and unidentified insects …

I can see outdoors through the window, but cannot hear or smell. I am indoors.

The television is another ‘window.’ While the subject inside is looking out upon the natural world, TV brings inside the artificial, commercial, tinsel-world that dominates so much contemporary landscape. The antenna suggests ‘signals’ and ‘intelligence,’ but that is an empty illusion: the interior is relatively void; intelligence, spirit, life are outside, beyond the window, and far beyond channel WXYZ.

The subject knows this, and obviously rejects television and the diminished, man-made world. Nevertheless, the there is an insurmountable veil between the subject and nature. However much the subject longs to be one with primal creation, he is trapped; inside the room; on the other side of the window. Trapped by his own nature, compromised by years of school, work, civilization ... Destined to be forever incomplete.

Garrett’s “Boy Scout Woods” Fifty Years Ago

This sketch is more abstract, and is rooted deeper, at the very core of my being.

Long ago my paternal grandmother owned and lived on a few acres adjacent to Garrett’s “Boy Scout Woods,” named so because the Boy Scouts had built a cabin just inside its growth, where they would camp and build fires visible at dusk and on into the night. I can remember living at the very mouth of those woods in a small, converted garage, with my father, mother, and oldest sister, when I turned three; and I remember my father building a proper house on that land when I was four.

By first grade the land was subdivided and we had moved, but I often stayed overnight at my grandmother’s, from where I could see the campfires and the scouts, no more than fifty yards away. My grandmother would tell me “When you are twelve, you can be a Boy Scout and camp there …”

I never did. Somehow that activity eventually ceased, but as a child in the third through sixth grades I would walk the half mile from my new neighborhood to the woods to spend the day, or at least a few hours, with or without friends, and usually with a knapsack, lunch, canteen, and pocketknife.

What primal, grand, so-not-school, so-not-house experience! The brush was thick, and twenty feet down a trail, I was invisible to the civilized world; better yet, it had vanished for me!

This place (lost to progress circa 1974), and the feelings it engendered – longing, awe, mystery - have been vital touch-points in my emotional and spiritual life throughout all the intervening years. And this is what is reflected somewhat abstractly in the sketch:

The subject approaches the portal: a confluence of natural, emotional, metaphysical, and spiritual power. Nature and the wild are suggested by the tangled bramble, while the circular highlight in the central space suggests light itself - a calm clearing, perhaps the eye of enlightenment, sheltered in the heart of nature, while reminding me of the campfire I had longed so to be near.

Unlike in the trailer window meditation, where the window is a subtle but real barrier, here the subject actually moves toward the portal, unconstrained. Yet … the especially heavy growth between him and the center suggests he may never be able to really find his way there.

Aside from that illuminated center, the ‘brush’ is more dense as one moves inward, and the shape suggests a head of hair; i.e. a mental journey; meditation.

So Where Does This Bring Us?

The original question was whether Art is primarily a matter of technical mastery and execution, or is it fundamentally the incarnation of soulful inspiration and concept. For me, the answer is obvious: inspiration and concept are the heART of Art, and while technical mastery is helpful, especially if you want others to like or appreciate your art, it is not at all necessary if your objective is solely self-expression and damn anyone else’s judgment! And frankly, while I admire great, and even merely good art, these technically immature, personal sketches will always be more gratifying to me than any Da Vinci or Van Gogh. Sacrilege, yes; but true, and I know that at least Emerson would be on my side.

So if this answer suits you as well as it suits me, I urge you to give it a shot. Explore and sound your depths, your singularity! Through sketching or painting? Maybe, but perhaps your most authentic mode is song? Or what about guitar, fiddle, violin, or harmonica? Photography, poetry, carving, or dance? Assemblage, ceramics, collage, or macramé? What about local theater? Or something as private as writing a personal journal or diary?

There must be a thousand artistic modalities … So explore, choose one, and Sing Out!

Who knows what you may discover, or how gratifying your discovery may be?

Note: On the trailer, see the blog post I Live in a Trailer, my all-time, best-received post by a long way.

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Stephen Rowe welcomes correspondence of all sort at StephenRowe.OriGraphics@yahoo.com

(watch for the period between Rowe and OriGraphics), and can be found be found on Facebook by typing ArtMissionary  (all one word) into its “Search for people” form.