Seth's Artistic Advice to Rob Butts (2)

Seth Early Sessions, Vol 8, Session 401

Seth’s Artistic Advice To Rob Butts (2)

Now.  Sketching freely outdoors will allow you freedom that will be beneficial.

It is easier then to sense and feel the alive energy within and beneath the physical forms that you see.  It is easier to feel yourself as the artist, also a part of the landscape that you paint; to sense the merging of your own energy into the scene before you, and to realize that you are a part of it also.  For you paint reality from within.

You cannot step outside it for a better view.  It is easier to realize that the vision and the ever-alive energy are far more permanent than the forms.  The permanency and the timeless quality do not belong to the shapes of the mountains and the trees, but to the conscious energy that forms them.

You as artist, symbolically speaking, should not step backward to see the landscape more clearly, but step into it so that you can feel it more clearly.  If you sense the peculiar and overall gestalt that is beneath the form at any given time, then creation of the form will follow naturally and truly.

The form is caused by a characteristic condition of the energy at any given time.  If you are intuitively aware of that miraculous neatness, if you allow yourself to be enveloped within that particular moment point, then the painting will form itself about you in somewhat the same manner that I am formed about Ruburt’s voice.  But your painting of course will be more visible.

You should in any case whenever possible sketch outdoors, for you are personally renewed by such an encounter, and the implications are very different.  When you are outdoors sketching there is before you a large expanse.  It is easier to think in terms of size and expansion.  Thoughts of expansion will help your work, so that the energy and vision are not imprisoned by form but are within form, even while in the process of change.

When you are sketching outdoors, as a helpful exercise I suggest the following: attach your focus of attention to one small thing.  It may be a flower or a stone.  Something however that catches your own eye.  Imagine the energy within that object perpetual, but in terms of being endlessly alive and vital.

Pretend that the energy within that object is the center of life, so that the whole rest of the universe derives its energy within that stone or flower.  Do this until you can feel that energy pulsate within the form of the object, so that the form itself is ever mobile while it retains the semblance, as in a stone, of immobility.

Think of the energy as radiating outward from the object, giving life to all other things, whether or not any specific objects are to be in any given painting.  This will result in paintings in which your chosen point of attention radiates through the form, illuminating all other objects in the painting, and psychically radiating outward from the painting.

It will automatically be evocative of other objects not in the painting, and will automatically remind the viewer of the universe that you did not paint.  Expansiveness is built in psychically in this manner.

I believe that some Spanish artists in the past utilized this same sort of idea.

Now in other ways it was also utilized by your old masters.  The expansiveness then was also of a spiritual nature.  Whatever objects were shown in the painting automatically presupposed the existence of spiritual realities, and other universes, though these presuppositions were highly ritualistic.

The meaning behind them was known to all.  Each of the great masters’ paintings somehow suggests the existence of far greater realities, of which the paintings were a part.  They saw the objects within their paintings as portions of a greater whole that was suggested by the painting.

Now the suggestions I have given you is the same sort of thing.  There is no dependence upon agreed ritualistic symbol, however.  The exercise itself will allow you to make the necessary transformation, where the one becomes all.  Now this is the expansion of which I am speaking.  It will cause immediate physical evocative reactions.

The timeless quality will be built in, for the painting itself, though flawless in form, will suggest the changing quality of form, and stress the permanent quality that gives it its meaning.  If you as artist are also aware that the same energy that fills the form that you paint also forms your own image, then the transformation into something better than excellent art is made.

Now the energy can be best suggested by transparents, rather than opaques, for the opaques are too ponderous.  The opaques can be used effectively to suggest the form, superimposed lightly over the transparent energy, but never with a heavy hand.

A good use of transparents in oils will make you more pleased with using them.  Movement can be best portrayed also with transparents, and even for rocks.  While opaques may be used to suggest the physical heaviness, transparents should be used also to show that in actuality rocks are as light as air, and to hint at the ever-mobile energy that forms them.

Now again, much of this has to do with your own interest.  Opaques are excellent to suggest a heavy or dark mood.  In portraits, while the inner skeletal structure must be hinted at, still there should be the suggestion of the personality going beyond the image, and of the personality’s energy radiating outward.

In a portrait, do the same exercise as given earlier.  Imagine the individual as the center of all life, so that when the painting is completed it automatically suggests the whole universe of which the individual is part.  Nothing exists in isolation, and this is the secret that the old masters knew so well.

In the smallest detail of the smallest still life they managed to suggest the reality of the spiritual universe, of which that detail was a part, and through which the energy of the universe spoke.

To use your talents, and they are considerable, you can do no less.

Painting or sketching outdoors for a while will aid you considerably in your ability to sense this inner unity, to see each natural object in its individualistic momentary majesty, and yet to realize that it is in one way a center through which all energy moves.

In itself an object should be then felt as its unique identity, and as a part of the whole universe.  A stone or a flower is a very small thing.  When you attach your attention say to a flower, it is not only a matter of imagining yourself as the flower, or trying to sense what a flower is.  It is also to imagine the power of the energy that causes the flower to grow; and yet in a landscape you will have perhaps many flowers.  They must each suggest the reality of the overall pulsating vitality that makes their appearance possible.

Now oils themselves suggest the earth.  The medium is a fairly natural one.  Let the medium then stand for and represent the physical appearance of permanency in any object, the physical continuity of any given human form in a painting.  Let transparents represent the constant renewal of energy that always escapes the form.  These lift the medium itself into another realm, and the two together can suit your purposes well.

Now one other small point.

An apple can do more in a painting than stand for the spirit of all apples, though that is an accomplishment.  An apple can imply, through use of the exercise I have given you, the whole unseen universe, though not another object is shown in the painting itself.

With oils again the transparents for the mobility and vitality that gives the form meaning, the opaques to suggest the idea of physical time, and to suggest the apparent duration of form.

…  Energy fills out the sails of form.  The energy is psychic and spiritual.  It will endure as long as there are people to look at paintings.  If you can suggest this, and you can, Joseph, then you will truly fulfill your artistic abilities.  To some extent you have been trapped by the object, trying so hard to identify with it that this kind of expansion was not possible.

The skin of the apple must also give the feeling that it is more than an enclosure, for through it energy from the sun also comes.  While it seems solid it is open, and connected with the rest of the universe.  An apple in a room goes out into that room.

An apple is not stuck within a tight hole of space, you see, isolated there.  It makes itself out of space, transforms space, into an apple, and this you must suggest.

Now, some of my suggestions for you this evening come from better sources than I.  For as you know I am no artist.

This has something to do with Ruburt’s difficulty in breaking the trance state.  From someone else here …  Your figures, to get the feeling of depth and breadth, this is not to get the feeling simply of the flesh and bone within the flesh, but to suggest the personal energy and vitality that is in a riot, to be loose within the flesh.

This is from an artist who always used siennas for initial flesh tones, with a suggestion very lightly of violets.  Built up then cleverly with transparent ochre which he had, and a particular green, muted.  The top complexion tone lay on this lightly, as if the wind could blow it away, and of course he suggests this.

(“Can you give me his name?”)

We are working on it.  Van Elder.  Dane or Norwegian, domestic scenes, 1700’s.  Straggly grass scenes and small mounds of ground, brownish foregrounds.  I am not sure, 1781, or 1881 …

(“Representing what?”)

Having to do with him.  Now as the clouds’ construction constantly changes – tonight you watched them so the forms of objects constantly change.