Creative remembrance

We peo­ple are gen­er­ally unable of great visu­al­is­ing abil­i­ties. None of us has a per­fect pho­to­graphic mem­ory of faces and intri­cate details of human fig­ure. Even the com­pe­tent artists need time to develop details out of their mem­ory, through lay­ered sketching.

With­out any help of pic­tures and paint­ings, our best con­scious effort to visu­alise a face is its semi-abstract form, with sev­eral key points: basic shape of the head, posi­tion of eyes, nose, hair, lips. We gen­er­ally tend to “tag” a cer­tain face with an emo­tion, like “funny guy”, or “sad eyes”, etc. that help us pull out from remem­brance all addi­tional details asso­ci­ated with that tag.

Some­times it takes few venues to remem­ber someone’s eyes colour.

Hav­ing this is mind, it actu­ally doesn’t mat­ter which image of Radha and Krishna we have in front of us, because in our minds they’ll trans­form into semi-abstract imagery as soon as we turn our heads away from the image.

The idea with devo­tional med­i­ta­tion and remem­brance is sim­i­lar to that one prac­tised by great artists – not to keep one image in mind and end­lessly remind our­self about it, but rather to dwell into it, explore, build up pos­i­tive thoughts about it and pull it out from the frag­mented mem­ory into our con­scious mind. Layer by layer, patiently, with even more intri­cate details which are not only visual, but emotional.

At moments that image comes alive and moves, caus­ing a sen­sa­tion that resem­bles flame of delight going up. We should try to fol­low the image, whilst keep­ing our atten­tion to the process.

Remind­ing our­selves of Rad­hika in every female face, fig­ure and smile is cer­tainly a highly effec­tive med­i­ta­tion and arrest­ing approach. Many won­dered divine Raphael (as the famous painter was called dur­ing his time and ever after) was blessed by Madonna and was able to see her every­where solely because his Madon­nas were so breath­tak­ingly beau­ti­ful and ethereal.

In our every­day life we should try to be pos­i­tively cre­ative too, and chan­nel our thoughts into cre­ation. Cre­ativ­ity is inspir­ing and life-changing. Won­der­ful exam­ples are artists, who have cre­ated mag­nif­i­cent art through his­tory. The power of their visu­al­i­sa­tion was absolutely incred­i­ble and is still enchant­ing us. Here’s what Jacopo Tin­toretto, late Renais­sance and Man­ner­ist Ital­ian artist per excel­lence, wrote:

“Beau­ti­ful colours can be bought in the shops on the Riato, but good draw­ing can only be bought from the cas­ket of the artist’s tal­ent with patient study and nights with­out sleep.” He reminds us what are the fun­da­men­tals of a good com­po­si­tion – cre­ativ­ity, pas­sion and good draw­ing skills. Why draw­ing skills are so impor­tant? In fig­ure and real­is­tic paint­ing, apply­ing colour usu­ally comes at end, and colour only empha­sises and com­pletes good ini­tial design, not over­pow­er­ing it or los­ing itself in a seem­ingly daz­zling, but form­less and point­less colour mess.

Trans­lated into our inner med­i­ta­tive and devo­tional life that means we should first learn how we express our thoughts and feel­ings, shape them and learn about them and our­selves, put core val­ues and hopes of our lives where they cre­ate a nice devo­tional sketch … and then add colour.

Tin­toretto fur­ther adds, “Draw­ing is the foun­da­tion of a painter’s work, but draw­ing from life in the nude should only be essayed by well-practiced men, as the real is often want­ing in beauty.” Here he points that the beauty is expe­ri­enced in the heart of a true artist, and such an inner vision sur­passes beauty of any­thing found in this world. Good artists often ide­alise every­day beauty because they use real-life mod­els just as sym­bols to express feel­ings of an over­pow­er­ing spir­i­tual and aes­thetic rap­ture that is beyond comprehension. 

We should try to develop sim­i­lar pas­sion for every­thing we want to achieve in our spir­i­tual lives. Tin­toretto had his inspi­ra­tion as well, in Michelan­gelo and Tiz­ian. We should also have our devo­tional inspi­ra­tion, or a role model too. It helps enor­mously and isn’t it amaz­ing to see how art and nat­ural devo­tion are so much alike?

– Zvon­imir Tosic

Book­mark It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 07:00 and is filed under Cursum perficio and tagged with creativity, meditation, painting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.