OGT DAILY - Day Sixty - GRACE

The act of creating a painting requires the presence of grace even if the product is not so pretty.
The last month has been a striving for this presence with fleeting moments of success.   It is hard to embody grace when in a constant state of stress and watching the news, FB, the paper, radio has been anything but conducive of gracefulness.

However last night I was in bed by eleven and then up today by 6:30 when I did my stretches and a kind of a deep resonant meditation using focussed breathing and acknowledgement of a divine grace which can induce a state of calm, clarity and focus.   Focussed or "coherent" breathing, by the way is a technique I've learned, which comes from Stephen Elliot, a yoga teacher who developed this method of visualizing focal points for the breath as a way to reset the autonomic nervous system as in QiGong breathing exercises.  For more information: www.coherence.com.   I have been reading Peter Levine's book as well,  In An Unspoken Voice - about the work of allowing the body to reset itself naturally after a state of trauma, which involves natural physical movement like shaking or trembling.  It's wonderful really to become familiar with such methods to allow your body to heal from physical or psychic upsets without much fuss and with very simple movements.

At any rate today was a calm day and I would say somewhat grace filled.  Two of the ugliest canvases I have been struggling with gained a measure of wholeness today.  I'm not saying I don't appreciate their ugly states.   I do.  I am going to begin documenting the transformation of one of them.  It's just that there needs to be a state of grace between the mind, the hand and the body in order for an image to emerge.   They are all reflective of my inner life and the ugly gives testament to tremendous struggle with anxiety which is national affliction if not international at this point.   It's just that the ugly image is restless; has not yet found its point of balance; its inner grace.   At least one of the ugly paintings reached a point of balance today even in its ugliness.   That was a small victory.

Here is a favorite painting/painter of mine.  An image filled with grace:

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit by John Singer Sargeant 

Detail

Notice how in the detail the doll she holds is created out of loose brushstrokes.   When you step back from the painting it becomes solid and your eye sees a doll.   This was Sargeant's genius, his ability to make the casual mark appear so unstudied when it so completely conveys an aspect of realism.  I just love the balance between light and dark and the older girls retreating into darkness as adolescents will do.   There is both an ease and a tension in this image which makes it so compelling.  I saw it in person at The Museum of Fine Arts Boston - flanked by the two Chinese blue vessels which are in the painting.