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| 2009/07/28 08:39:06瀏覽365｜回應1｜推薦2 | |
THOUGHTS ABOUT THE JOURNEY ”Whatever work you do, there are two things to learn. The first is how to do the actual work, how to do your job, which is what you learn in school and college. This is what most people in the world are educated to do. But that alone is not sufficient... That is nowhere near enough to ensure that your actions serve as an unmistaken cause of happiness. Simply knowing how to do your job never solves your problems completely. Neglecting inner education, which teaches you the attitude with which you should perform tasks and how to live your life, and focusing on outer education alone brings neither satisfaction nor fulfillment to your heart. It is of the utmost importance that you understand how to use your mind correctly when you do the things you do. Internal work ñ how to use your mind, how to motivate your actions ñ is far more important than external work, because it is this that determines whether what you do becomes the cause of happiness or the cause of suffering. How to live intelligently is not taught in schools, colleges or universities. Because you get paid for doing your job, it appears to be the cause of happiness and you believe it to be so. In reality, no matter how perfectly you do your job, how skilled you are or how many billions you make. since you are doing it out of worldly motivation (and) attachment the work,you do can never become the cause of happiness but constantly becomes the cause of suffering instead “ LAMA ZOPZ RINPOCHE
Success is one thing, happiness another, so a career artist must achieve balance between the various competing elements of life: art, career, family, friends and so on. We all want to be happy and so there's the need to look after oneself, not only as an individual but as the primary employee in your own small business. On the assumption that you started out wanting to be an artist - and not just a painter in watercolour - then you will try to find a reasonable balance between the things that generate income and those that don't. I guess that most of us start out fascinated by watercolour itself. We know that we'll have to learn the skills involved and may think that that's all we'll have to learn. But we soon find out that watercolour is not as easy as it looked when we saw it demonstrated and can be pretty confronting. From the beginning we find that our skills are affected by things that have to do with our mental state - with hesitation for example or assumptions about the medium we've got to overcome, or whatever. Watercolour SHOULD be easy, but it isn't. And so you work hard tolearn the many drills and disciplines required for mixing and applying wash until at last you start to understand the way that watercolour actually works. Around about then you also develop a better feeling for the ways that you can coax it to stay and settle where you want it to. You think you've learned a physical skill yet also sense a change in your attitude to painting. You may feel even more excited and more confident and notice that even mixing paint has become a time for mental preparation - in the same way that an oriental ink painter sees the grinding of ink as a kind of meditation to calm the spirit before painting. A painter in the `western' tradition may be less likely to recognize these changes as development of an `inner' art that is fully as important as any increase of technical skill. Technical achievement tends to the target we shoot for, thus missing the real purpose for involvement, which probably started out as happiness. Can painting be a path to happiness? Well yes, because it CAN make us happy while we are doing it. And `materialistic painting' may lead us towards a common type of unhappiness, brought about by turning something we enjoyed once into a mere tool for making money. There IS an inner-art to watercolour. It starts with the mind-body co-ordination so critical to achieving a working relationship with your medium - so that you and it become one and you can paint without having to plan every step - free to; act on impulse and with the medium responding to your call. There may also be a greater sense of a greater fulfillment, so that painting is not just about pictures but also about feeling somehow more evolved as a human being. I'm not alluding to any religious notion, but simply noting that art has always been about more than the art objects we might create. It ha to do with feeling great, and with a better sense of who we are and why. A landscape painter may come to feel more connected to nature - not only because of painting `landscapes' but also because doing so helps them to engage with the natural world and to see and experience the colour and textures and shapes of the world more, keenly. Anyone who has spent a day painting skies will know how, driving home afterwards, you see the sunset more intensely than you would have if the day had been spent reading! And that's only part of it. Being a painter is much more than being an observer. It's like swimming because you experience the planet in a way that requires you to think differently. It's a total immersion experience when you plunge in, and even paddling is exciting. To work with your medium you have to learn new skills and these require and develop new types of mental and physical co-ordination. The further you adventure from `the shore', the more you depend upon your inner resources, but yet you always return invigorated and refreshed. The Japanese have a word, misogi, that uniquely describes this process. It means purification ó washing your mind within an activity, much as you might wash your body in water, and then emerging renewed by the experience. Finally there is a very practical side to the thoughts of the Lama: when we are attached to the `worldly success' of our art - the attachment to winning prizes or selling well are examples - then we start to lose sight of its potential to bring special qualities to life that are not so easy to measure. Painters tend to dream of hitting the big-time (or even the small-time) someday. We want to feel that our work is progressing, that we are fulfilling ourselves and bringing joy into the lives of those we care about. We want our work to be appreciated and many dream of a viable professional career. Some succeed at it, but the dreaming can also become the cause of unhappiness as we dream of more and more success. Yet if we hold onto the simple pleasure of painting for its own sake - even though it may also be your source of income - and keep that uppermost in our mind then the joy may be there in your work to see and, not so strangely, lead to increased sales. But even if sales don't go up, your own appreciation of each moment will and so will the chances of making each painting a great success - for nothing is more likely to mess up a painting than the fear of failure that comes from attachment to succeeding (that `I might mess it up' feeling causing you to freeze or fumble something at a critical moment). So where does all this `philosophy' lead? One of the most important practical things to do is to get the balance right between family, career and art. There will always be things that we need do for those we love along with other things that we do to earn a living but there should also be things that we are prepared to do just for ourselves. I didn't start painting with ideas of a career. I wanted to paint for me. I was fascinated by watercolour and worked hard at it because I loved it. But then of course I made the fateful decision to become a `full-time professional'. From then on my life balance was all tied up in watercolour. I still painted for the joy of it BUT I now had to keep my family by painting. It couldn't be a hobby anymore. Things had changed and so I had to find some kind of balance. The way I see it now, I'm still painting for me, rather than "the market" but I also know I'll have to sell some of what I paint. So I try to think like an artist when painting, but think like a business-person when I select which ones to frame. And I still paint lots of pictures for ME - all sorts of experiments that no-one else may ever see or appreciate but bring me fulfillment and the feeling that I'm moving forward. Most painters quickly find out that painting to just please people or to win public approval is not a path worth traveling, so I always focused on the things that I wanted to paint and in the way that I wanted to. But I'm also aware that many of the greatest names from art history were also very business-like. It's how they survived and were able to keep painting (and we got to know about them). And so in my own small way I try to keep a personal balance. A Chinese painter of the 11th Century wrote of his father: "On a day that he was to paint, he would seat himself at a bright window with fine paints before him. He would mix them as if preparing to welcome an honoured guest. Then, when inspiration seized him, he painted with the focus of a man guarding against a strong enemy. Yet if he were interrupted he would lay down his brushes and welcome the visitor with equanimity". This is a summary of a historic painter's inner-balance as a watercolourist but more than that, it is also a model for practise that any professional would admire today.
"Guardian", watercolour heightened with bodycolour, 6 x 8" (140 x 190mm) |
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