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12 nights – more drawings …

 

 

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I guess my illustrations to some degree could either be read as a successful attempt to ban those thoughts that are accosting us when we try to engage in meditation by giving them form, or as a document of failure because all those thoughts that in meditation are to be let through were instead allowed to manifest themselves in a permanent form. One of the amazing aspects of art is surely that is demonstrates that our mind is always, ALWAYS, generating images and thoughts unless we dedicate some time to some sensual deprivation and allow the void to fill the crowded space of our anxious minds. As an artist I live by generating images, not necessarily by letting go of them. And yet there is a peaceful, non-goal oriented quality to these drawings and I can conjure up the spirit of those nights just by looking at them.

12 nights – samples

End of December I observe a yearly time of night meditation, roughly in sync with some old traditions but not necessarily bound by them. To keep awake 12 nights in a row and in quiet meditation is much easier when the mind is allowed an activity – and drawing is my very personal way of quieting my mind. Night after night I produced two to three drawings, taking a photo at the end of each night, recording the creatures of fancy accumulating … As a side-effect I switched back from painting to drawing to prepare an illustrated history of some sorts that I am starting these days.

lunacy

From that day on my world has been different. Even though I have lost some of the feverishness that I lived with back then, a feverishness that brought on a clarity about which I knew nothing as long as it lasted, I still hold it for possible that at any moment in our lives just about anything can happen. I still know that we are like divers in a deep ocean finding access to different currents and tides, each one of them distinctly different in temperature, clarity and speed. Accepting the reality of the girl in the window I acknowledged that I preferred to be raving mad to inhabiting a world without surprises. A suburban world where everything was designed to be stagnant or at least to create the never to be questioned illusion of stability. Even my free spirited artist mother surfed the tide of that illusion. That day I rejected the comforting hand of a reality created by others for needs I didn’t even knew I might have one day. Instead I allowed myself an unfiltered acknowledgement of the impulses that my brain felt inclined to produce. I did not know whether or not there was anything out there at all, I didn’t know if we possess any kind of objective reality but whereas before that had horribly worried me (along with the question how to prove to oneself that one exists at all outside the universe of our own brain), suddenly I was intrigued by the freedom of it. So what – if this girl in the mirror did not exist, I could still see her bright and clear, she looked like a normal kid.