painting in process… and musing about certainty…

It seems there is a lot of uncertainty in the air lately, in the world and in everybody’s life. Perhaps as an artist we don’t noticed it much before because uncertainty seems to be a part of making art. Do we ever know why we make this or that paint stroke or why we choose this or that color? I may have learned about color and form and line and proportions etc. but when I paint I am not sure why I do what I do, but eventually I do make a stroke, this way or that. Then I might paint over it again and in the end it might look totally different from what I first thought it would look. There are a thousand different ways the painting could turn out, why this way? Does it matter?

Buddha and many other saints have said that, impermanence is the state of this world and it is constantly changing. So why do we have this tendency to want certainty? Like in an earthquake we instinctively hold onto that what we think is stable, the table leg, the wall etc. while the ground is moving. Most people center their lifes around something they percive as stable, their job, their family, having a routine makes us feel grounded and gives a sense of certainty.
I sometimes dance while painting, sometimes I whirl around like a kid or a dervish and noticed that the less my focus is on the world flying by, the less dizzy I get. In yoga we are taught to focus on a point on the groundfeeling grounded, being ground.

Lately I have started to paint in silence. It is later in the night that the silence gets so exquisite and thick that the hand hardly wants to move. I think it gets easier in the night to switch off the weary mind and surrender… just paint without knowing what one does is right or wrong… just doing, just being.

This is how Tukaram (an Indian saint) puts it…. see previous post!