Art, and then some

Hello!! 

The first project my oil painting students do when they start class is a still life of fruit, and almost everyone gets tripped up by the lemon. They don’t paint its shadow dark enough, and they make it look like a skinny football.

So before they start their first painting, they are asked to watch a video I made about seeing. The video uses a lemon as an example to teach students how their seeing is warped and they don’t even know it. 

Lemons

In the video I explain how they don’t see the lemon that’s right in front of them. They don’t see a roundish fresh lemon siting in strong sunshine on a crimson surface with a long cast shadow. They see the generic image of a lemon they’ve been carrying around in their heads all their life. They paint from this simple imaginary image without really looking at the one in their still life. 

Their brain has a stored impression of a lemon symbol that overlays and obscures what’s actually in front of them, and they’re sure that their way of seeing is correct. I explain that hey’ve seen lots of lemons in their life and have lots of memories about them. 

Maybe they’e we’ve seen funny videos of baby sucking on them. 

They’ve seen lemons turn green with mold when they go bad. 

They like lemons. They don’t like lemons. 

They got drunk in the Bahamas on lemon drop martinis. 

Their sister’s favorite food is lemon bars. 

Their friend Nick slipped on one once and broke his tailbone. 

All that info goes into brain storage, but it’s there, affecting their ability to see lemons clearly, 

Clearly meaning seeing this lemon on this day in this light. 

Seeing

Direct experience is what you see before your mind has a thought about it.

This one lesson sums up the most important thing I am teaching as an oil painting instructor. We have to overcome believing what our mind says about what’s in front of us, and see with our sense of sight. 

Learning to oil paint or render realistically with any material is about learning to see. 

But this idea of seeing with our mind instead of our eyes applies to everything we perceive. Every situation and encounter and circumstance of our life is colored by stored impressions from the past. We see through a filter of old ideas. 

I call this filter the Net. It’s a network of ingrained beliefs. We all have them. Why else would different people have so many different perspectives on any one situation? Our ideas about what we encounter override the actuality of what’s happening in front of us, and we suffer for it. We don’t paint a realistic picture of life. We are like marionettes, being manipulated by the puppet master of our cultural training. 

Painting a lemon poorly is a the worst consequence we’d have for not seeing clearly in painting class. But making decisions about life from unexamined, deep-rooted assumptions can have greater consequences. 

Our relationships, work and pastimes, health, and overall viewpoint of life in the world are affected. And because of it we tend to have default, background sense of low-grade worry. We know something isn’t quite right. Instead the vibrant uniqueness of each present moment, we are experiencing something like the lemon in our mind: a flat, misshapen, immature facsimile of what’s in front us 

WAN Program

I’ve spent most of my life practicing in different wisdom traditions to overcome living from false interpretations of the world. I created the WAN program after being inspired to share what I’ve learned, just as I became a painting teacher after I’d had lots of experience and joy from it. 

Painting is powerful itself. 

I’ve seen the miracle of change in my painting students. They paint well when they see past the proverbial lemon symbols in their heads, but there’s more going on than learning a skill. 

The power of creativity is being talked about in all kinds of books and videos these days, and   they especially tout the effectiveness of community art class. Creativity has power and magic in it. And it’s magnified exponentially when we do it together. 

Without a Net plays with the same elements of painting class, only we apply to our lives. In painting class our paintings get more realistic and express our unique signature. In WAN we get more conscious, more honest, and more adept at acting from clear vision. We become more joyful. 

For fun, I’ll go over some of the most basic and important instructions from painting class. And I’ll relate them to how WAN applies them to the bigger picture.  

Look at your subject

I tell my painting students to look at their subject matter. They often look at the canvas, thinking about what will or should transpire. Their canvas won’t tell them what the mountains in their reference photo looks like. I tell them “Stop thinking and paint.” It’s always the answer. 

In WAN, we don’t focus on outcomes. That’s another way our sight gets clouded. We use our senses (just like seeing in painting) to get more in touch with what’s happening now, instead of worrying or wondering how it’s going to turn out or what it means. 

General to Specific

I tell my students if it looks good on your first coat, you’re not doing it right. They first need to finish a basic, quick base coat or they’ll get caught in details and lose sight of the cohesiveness of the big picture. We call it General, then specific. 

In WAN I say we focus on the essential, not the fascinating. Our stories and dramas about life are interesting and maybe entertaining, but we want to live and make decisions from a fundamental grounding in truths that aren’t clouded by the melodrama and particulars of our stored impressions. 

Contrast

I tell my painting students “Don’t be afraid of the dark.” They rarely realize how dark the shadows need to be to show the proper contrast for depth and perspective in a painting.  

In WAN, participants say, “I’m uncovering all this dark stuff. How long does this go on?” I tell them the same thing I tell painters: to settle in and get used to the dark until you are comfortable with it and even like it. It’s not the enemy. It gives us depth and perspective in life. And as we get comfortable with it, what we thought was dark transforms into our greatest strengths. We start to welcome it.

Blend your edges

I tell painting students to blend their edges. This means they need to address the meeting place where objects and their background touches. In the Middle Ages, people in paintings look like flat cut-outs with sharp edges. In the Renaissance Leonardo Da Vinci came along and gave us sfumato, or soft, hazy edges, and paintings have looked more realistic ever since.

My students have to reminded a lot to do this. We forget that individual objects and people aren’t just separate, disconnected forms, to be pasted on a background like a sticker book.  A painting looks unfinished and jarring without blurred edges. The surface of the canvas should be covered in a seamless, cohesive field of paint so all its forms are part of an unbroken scene. 

In WAN we learn that we learn that our default perception is to see ourselves as having a solid boundary delineated by our skin instead of a part of the integrative whole of life. And that our opinions and beliefs, like the lemon in our head, form sharp edges that keep us blind and at odds with others. We practice to blur our sharp edges.

So how does WAN go about applying these creative skills? 

We do it the same way we do in painting class. We have a course that has all the basics, kept as honed and clear as it can be to get started. 

In painting class, the only way to get better is to paint.

In WAN, the only way to get better is to practice. There are lots of ways we practice.We use art, and imaginative, visionary practices that teach us to question our old way of perceiving. We practice using our five senses and our sense of awareness to get used to accessing direct experience. We learn to look straight at our present moments and enjoy their complexity and beauty, free of the old lemon vision. 

And we practice applying our new vision to our life situations. We want applied wisdom, not theorized knowledge. We want our joy to show in our relationships and everyday pastimes. 

In painting class we enjoy a sense of camaraderie, in an atmosphere of casual, playful relaxation. 

WAN has the same vibe. It may not sound possible for psychological discovery to be playful. But we see the uncovering of our hidden motives as “shining the light of loving awareness” on parts of us that really do want to be seen. In every part of the process we bring a warm and open sense of welcoming.

That’s what WAN is, in a tiny nutshell. 

I’ve been cagey about telling my painting students what I’ve been up to on the side for the past few years. It’s because I wouldn’t blame anyone for rolling their eyes at what some might call self-help or personal development or spiritual teachings. There’s a lot out there I’m that arena, and its appeal is highly individual. Just like art. 

So now the cat’s out of the bag. I know it’s not for everyone.

Sometimes my painting students say that painting class is their favorite two hours in their week. Without a Net is my attempt to help bring the joy and transformation of creativity into more areas than just picture painting so people can make their whole week like those two hours if they want.

WAN is for seeing if life could look a be a little more like the fresh, juicy, tangy, bright lemon in front of our eyes instead of the vague idea of one in our heads.