Seth's Artistic Advice to Rob Butts

Seth Early Sessions, Vol 8, Session 400

Seth’s Artistic Advice To Rob Butts

For you (pointing to me) always there has been a love of land, and the fruits of the land.

(An obvious connection I had never consciously made; since I enjoy using apples, oranges, fruits, eggs, etc., for models.)

You deal with emotion and creativity, and have always done so.  Your own ability as a draftsman, if the term is the correct one – your technical ability – was adopted for two reasons.

It was a tool of your art.  It was also a part of your talent.  It added to the dimension of your work, but to some degree it was also adopted as a protective mechanism, to give you some feeling of separation.  Your mother’s emotionalism frightened you so that you distrusted strong feeling, even while you must use it, and be vividly aware of it in order to paint.

In this life therefore this high technical ability allowed you to paint, for without it you would have been too frightened of the inner sensibilities necessary.  It has always had these two meanings for you, these two faces.

The precise delineation helped create the subject of the painting beautifully, with almost “supernatural” precision.  Yet the lines also served to protect you from that which you were painting, and from the feeling involved.

It allowed you to feel that you were capturing the subject, and to assure yourself that the subject was not capturing you.  You wanted to be sure that you were using your emotions or feelings and not that they were using you.

The realism has several significant meanings for you also.  Your mother felt literally trapped by physical life and circumstances.  As a youngster you felt that recreating portions of physical reality gave you a mastery and control over them.  The more precise and faithful the recreation, the more complete the mastery.

The emotionalism within the household seemed to be threatening, and in a free form.  You never knew when it would erupt, and as a child you felt helpless before it.  Through precise renderings you felt that you imprisoned it, and therefore controlled it.  In the beginning this had quite magical connotations for you.  Basically you have felt this magical commitment to realistic work, for to leave it would be to break the lines of this imprisonment, letting loose the emotions that you feared.

In the beginning you could not have painted if you had not allowed yourself to develop this technique, which allowed you to use emotion and yet contain it.  These elements helped form and define your abilities, adding to their particular and peculiar nature.

You are recognizing certain limitations that these developments put upon you.  The inner attitudes must be completely changed, though your methods and styles need not necessarily change one iota.  It would help you however to attempt larger work.  You are afraid of tackling too much feeling at once, and the mere fact of working larger would free you from this to some considerable extent.

At times you have been afraid of putting too much of yourself in your work, as if the painting then could imprison you.  In the back of your mind you thought of your mother and father, imprisoned in their house.  The house an emotional framework, but quite physical.

The technique can follow beautifully through as a handmaiden of the intuitions.  The technique can be channels of line through which feeling may flow.  Let the medium and technique follow naturally from the original vision.  Allow the vision then to take its own form.  But do not impose a form upon it.  Then this fine technique will be truly used to advantage.

Imagine the vision on the board, forming itself and evolving outward into physical reality, and let your fine technical abilities simply help the vision flow outward.

Imagine the inner vision flowing through your mind outward freely onto your board.  Then let your flawless technique follow the vision, and on occasion help define it.

This attitude alone will help you greatly.  A child develops in his own way.  A parent should not try to force, but follow the child’s natural bents.  So let your technical ability follow the vision’s natural bents.

Your feeling toward oil – you like it because you consider it basic and powerful; and for the same reason you have also not wanted to use it, resenting its personal connotations to you of raw emotion.

You did not consider it refined, in terms of process, enough.  Neither did you find yourself at home however with the acrylics, that you felt were over-refined, and too far away from basics.  Your problem being your overall attitude toward the emotion from which your art springs, for your attitude is then projected outward upon your mediums.  To some extent the present dilemma was initiated by your parent’s condition.

There is a feeling that emotion is formlessness.

Now freedom, a sense of freedom, has been emerging, which has led you toward a desire for larger work.  Let the vision in your mind emerge naturally, and it will expand and grow.

Working with subjects that initiate joy within you will also help free you, though you are to some extent frightened even of joy, distrusting it.  Still you will experience freedom when you deal with subjects that are evocative to you, of the joy of life or abundance of nature.

Inner visions of a psychic nature also give you freedom, since strangely enough your background did not give you any particular fear in that regard.  There is no personal tie up with the early distrust of fantasy.

Now in portrait work, looking at a subject easily for example, try to see him as he was in past lives.  This will add depth and dimension and vastly increase your own interest.  Now form is extremely important, but forms change constantly, and no form is permanent.  Therefore let your fine draftsman’s ability carry in itself that message: beautiful form but already in transition, with the vision beneath ever ready to adopt new shape.

Think first in terms of being yourself a medium, through which visions flow.  They will each to some degree suggest their own forms which you can faithfully follow.  Do not try consciously to settle upon any given medium, oil, et cetera, or consciously try to set up a lifetime program, in those terms, now.

The developments will come naturally from within, following the general trend followed by these inner visions.  Because you are you, you will attract your own unique visions, and if you follow these suggestions each vision will indicate its form and medium, and the general pattern of these will then be seen to be following along certain lines.

These lines – I mean directions – overall, will give you your uniquely original style.  You will not be forcing yourself along certain lines, nor trying to mold a pattern upon yourself from without.  The original style and so forth, the original slant and direction that you seek, will be the result of your own inner vision freely followed according to the suggestions I have tried to give you.  It already exists and is apparent in some of your work.

Some of this is habitual.  You have freed yourself to some considerable extent already, but you must remember to give your vision its own freedom and then follow it.

Now.  Again, the vision will imply and even sometimes dictate its own form, but the form should always exist as an attribute of the vision and not be imposed upon it.

Therefore concern yourself with the vision and the other matters will take care of themselves.  The vision must always be allowed freedom, for it is greater than its form.  That is important.  The vision shapes itself.  Let your hand follow your intuitions then, and the form will be seen to vibrate, for then the form and the vision are one.

The vision will take another form, but if you have faithfully followed through, then the vision and its adopted form become on moment point.  Allow the vision to express itself in form; again, do not attempt to impose the form upon the vision.  The form should grow out of the vision.

You will, quote, “pick up” visions that no one else can.  If you are a channel for these, your development is assured.  All of this presupposes of course the kind of technical training and background, and knowledge of the art necessary.  This you have.  So as Ruburt (Jane Roberts) is to try to be a channel, so think of yourself in those terms.

The vision that comes to you or through you has been automatically processed as it comes through.  This automatic processing is highly individual, and is what you do as a creator.  The vision comes seemingly from without.  As a creator you translate it into physical terms.

Now the change in the colors represented a sort of poltergeist activity on your part.

(Concerning the fading of colors in my temperas.)

A rather random activity in this case.  Initiated in part by your parents’ situation, and in pure annoyance at the dilemma we have been discussing.

Your materials must always serve your inner vision or you will be dissatisfied with them.  You must be bold in following the inner vision, free enough to follow it.  You have been somewhat hampered by your father’s over cautiousness and timidity.  This can be resolved however.

When you paint the land, do so thinking in terms having to do with its past as well as present and future.  Its inner development that has resulted in its present form, the energy behind the form.  Remember in your painting the relationship of one object to another, not in terms of space necessarily, the interrelationship of the vitality that forms the objects; the vibrating always changing reality within, say, the skin of the apple or the orange, the quite living consciousness within the molecules that make up what seems to be the solid surface of the fruit’s skin.

This is realism.  Realism is more than the surface of things.

The tempera has been important as a resting place for you in the dilemma.

Stop thinking in terms of the medium, then, let each vision suggest its own.