Blank Canvas (July 20, 2007)
I have a framed canvas that needs to be white washed and re-created into something new. I've had it since May of this year. I have yet to even pull my brushes and paints out of storage in an attempt to jump start my motivation. Due to lack of sleep, I wasn't focusing on work very well this morning and I began to ponder this issue, hoping to discover where I lost my creative inspiration. I decided that the best way to accomplish this would be to think back to the past and remember the last time I had an over-abundance of artistic ideas. I think I finished reading Stranger in a Strange Land and watched the movie Pi for the first time during the same month. This was well over a year and a half ago, but I vividly recall my new found enthusiasm for pure mathematics, symmetry and aesthetics. Last year, I nearly drafted a tattoo design for myself featuring the Milky Way and The Golden Triangle. As these memories flooded back during the early minutes of my lunch hour, I began an internet hunt for a diagram featuring The Golden Ratio that would serve as a good base for my newest painting endeavor. In the midst of my searching, I stumbled across a passage written by Plotinus that rather eloquently summed up every blog I've ever tried to write about self awareness. While it doesn't have an exact correlation to the formula I wanted to use to create beauty through my art, it nevertheless inspired me. It's funny how something you may really need presents itself while you are looking for something else, isn't it? Perhaps when I am less groggy after a good night's rest, I will elaborate... but until then, I will be painting this weekend... and as for today, I will share the paragraph that helped me "wake up" and get back to work:"Like anyone just wakened, the soul cannot look at bright object. It must be persuaded first to look at beautiful habits, then the works of beauty produced not by craftsman's skill but by virtue of men known for their goodness, then the soul of those who achieve beautiful deeds. "How can one see the beauty of a good soul?" Withdraw into yourself and look. If you do not as yet see beauty within you, do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautified; he cuts away here, he smooths it there, he makes this line lighter, this other one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble. Do you this, too. Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one radiance of beauty. Never cease "working at the statue" until there shines out upon you from it the divine sheen of virtue, until you see perfect "goodness firmly established in stainless shrine." Have you become like this? Do you see yourself, abiding within yourself, in pure solitude? Does nothing remain now to shatter that interior unity, nor anything external cling to your authentic self? Are you entirely that sole true light which is not contained by space, not confined to any circumscribed form, not diffused as something without a limit, but ever unmeasurable as something greater than all measure and something more than all quantity? Do you see yourself in this state? Then you have become vision itself. Be of good cheer. Remaining here you have ascended aloft. You need a guide no longer. Strain and see."
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