I’ve been painting the same painting over and over this past month, as a square and as a rectangle, adding and removing color, scaling it up and down, and rearranging the design elements. It has been a big ongoing lesson and one that has been super frustrating at times, particularly when it doesn’t work out. However, I’ve also learned quite a bit about how I work, what my preference are in terms of scale and color and overall composition.
The painting above is one that I love and I am going to hang with it for a while because it’s important to notice why I think it works.
I feel like I’m spending about as much time staring at paintings as actually painting these days. It can be hard to see progress sometimes and this feels related to how when I have been working on a painting for many hours, I lose my perspective and cannot see it clearly. As I was cleaning and sorting materials yesterday afternoon, I reminded myself that grit and resilience are developed through putting forth one’s best effort, then letting go, as best we can, of the outcome. I share this because I think many of us expect things to go well when we are finally able to carve a little time out of our lives to be creative, but that isn’t always true and it sometimes takes a great deal of failure to get it right.
Because I am a lover of words, and because words in other languages sound different in our mouths and minds and feel both mysterious and potent, I will share a word that I love. Shraddhā is the Sanskrit term used to refer to faith in Hinduism and Buddhism. In Nothing Holy About It: The Zen Of Being Just Who You Are author Tim Burkett offers a non-Western definition of this notion of faith. The Buddha, he notes, “defined shraddhā as the type of trust birds have in the tree in which they build their nests.”
When I am walking my dog in my neighborhood, I often find myself scanning trees for bird nests, wondering about the fragility of a home composed of twigs and leaves, and marveling at the determination and trust involved in that act. And so, despite the paintings that do not succeed, I return to the studio, some sort of blind faith lodged in the center of my being that this work is meaningful. I continue to make my best effort.