A lot’s been written about seeing as the deeper practice compared to looking. The point being that we’re open and engaged when seeing and not just a camera pointed at the world. Recently I was reminded that seeing is a good practice for being present. For much of the last year, I had my eyes glued to my phone screen as I walked to my studio- catching the news or texting- oblivious to the world around me. Back when I first moved to Savannah and everything was new, I took photos of the curious things I saw when walking our dog (RIP Lilly). Doing that engaged my attention in the real world and in the present moment.
So I began again last week to pay attention as I took that fifteen minute walk to the studio and I’ve been posting a photo each day to Instagram. Generally, a phone camera is best at looking at small-scale things and I enjoy focusing my attention closely, seeing patterns, odd shadows, the small details, overlooked background noise that our brains filter out when we’re just looking. I also noted that these patterns underlie the illusion that is painting.
The craft of painting requires one to ‘see’, whether recreating a realistic representation of a subject or finding the emotional spirit of it. In the latter, seeing is a deeper sensing of a subject’s essence: a reading of the emotional conversation between subject and viewer in which the painting is the screen between the two.
Some years ago I made a pastel drawing to accompany a sonnet, both inspired by René Magritte’s This Is Not A Pipe. The sonnet ends, “it’s all electrons entering the eye/ and tickling the moment in between/ what’s happening right now and what’s gone by./ Each 'I' a fog of possibility/ whose meaning is condensed in memory.” The daily photos are a documentary of my practice of ‘seeing’, not the purpose of it. My paintings are an artifact of the practice of dreaming while awake, of bringing the inner essence to the surface, of condensing, on a flat canvas, from the images in my brain, a memory of a moment (or, in truth, a lifetime) that was the present, an artifact of the practice of seeing.