Meditation, Therapy, Landscape Painting, and Work.

In meditation they talk about this concept of the blue sky, the idea that if you are watching the sky you notice clouds passing over you. And in a way, each thought, or anxiety, is like this cloud.

We acknowledge it, maybe we enjoy it, but it moves on. You cant exactly keep that cloud over you, rather you just observe it in the moment and then watch it pass.

I’m a huge fan of meditative sad boy indie music, and there is this line from Bill Callahan that is something like.

“I use to be lighter, then I got darker, then I got light again. Like something to big to be seen was passing over and over me.”

I think Bill Callahan is a kind of transcendental meditation guy, so I’m sure he’s thinking of this same concept.

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When I go to art museums now I spend a ton of time looking at American landscape paintings, or French landscape paintings, or landscape paintings in general. But particularly there was a period of American landscape painting that the older I get the more I keep coming back to.

And I like to imagine what it was like then, to sit on the banks of a river and watch the clouds pass over and over.

I had always thought of landscape painting as so divorced from the kind of art I wanted to do, or the kind of art that I did in general. But the older and older I get the more I understand it as a process of building.

And then I wonder if there is a way to create work, designs, art, paintings, sketchbook pages, that contribute to this idea of building scenes.

Like surely those who sat on the banks of a river watching the clouds and painting were unaware of the impact those constructed scenes would have. Was it the act of creating them, or the act of discovering them that led to some change.

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I don’t think of myself as a working artist anymore, my professional life has become more design and communications, and in my personal life art has become a kind of all encompassing thing that feels more akin to something like cooking.

There are times, where it feels like it comes in these waves, these clouds passing. When it’s there, and I feel compelled to make something, or draw, or paint, or make music. I’ll sit with it creating and making. And then just as simply as it arrived it might pass.

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I’ve been in therapy working on a lot of things. But one thing I have noticed, is my mind quieting with a lot of pressures I felt to achieve and be the best and create. And in some ways it has made creating and making work more fulfilling.

The destruction of basically every social media platform, getting older, you feel less and less desire to post everything you create, and when your job isn’t related directly to your pursuit of “Art” there is no professional desire to constantly be preforming “Artist” and, for me, my work has become a bit more honest and settled into something I’m interested in.

But still I find myself thinking about landscape paintings, and how you construct scenes over time. When I'm watching the dog run around the back yard, or when I'm riding my bike down the street. When I'm on the coast watching the waves come in, or seeing the brilliant greens and browns of the plant life there.

I have this fantasy of painting old buildings, boats in the water, peoples houses under construction. These little scenes of life that only really have any meaning once they are in conversation with each other over time.