Loading...Since this has the possibility of being used as a resource for others I feel that I need to reiterate the background of this pursuit. For the past several years I have been involved in an ever deepening study of the word repentance translated from the Greek metanoia. Marcus Borg has said that this translates more completely as putting on a new mind rather than the implication that seems to exist for many people that it is somehow feeling bad about our failures to be good or sinless. Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault and others have taken this interpretation and expanded on it. Several months ago I read a book by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuro-anatomist, entitled My Stroke of Insight. She suffers a massive stroke that causes the left hemisphere of her brain to be rendered unusable and she describes the world from her perceptions using only the right hemisphere of her brain. I began to wonder if we were born with “a new mind” that we only needed to learn to more readily access rather than my earlier thought that we needed to develop this new mind.
All of us use this right hemisphere; we could not maneuver traffic if we had to use the logical sequencing of our left brain, but in our day and age for most of us the left brain is the master – controlling, ordering, and sublimating the right hemisphere for most of our activities. There are many avenues to greater use of the right brain, but one of the easiest and the one that makes it the most easily accessible is art.
During Lent of this year (2014) we did a program called “Lenten Kindergarten” where we tried to more fully access and utilize this right hemisphere. The program for most people was fun and helped to make them more aware of a different way of using their brain, a different way of seeing what was in front of them.
The Cape School of Art was founded in 1899 by Charles Hawthorne in order to teach the way of seeing that Monet had begun with his Impressionistic paintings. Hawthorn, and later his assistant Henry Hensche, taught that how we really see the world is bathed in the light that is present at any given moment and that the light changes – by time of day and weather conditions. They believed that morning, afternoon and evening light were very different and that a scene on a sunny day would be perceived very differently from the same scene on a cloudy day. What they came to believe and to teach is that what we actually see is the light, but that we translate what we actually see into what our brain tells us is before us. For example, they believed that a tree bathed in sunlight would be seen as the color of the sunlight, but that our brain would translate this into the color green because that is what our brain tells us is the color of a tree. For me this read as our left hemisphere controlling the information that was being processed into the logic of the local color of the tree instead of what we might be seeing when this green tree is bathed in strong sunlight.
The week long class that I took was taught by Hilda Neily (HildaNeilyGallery.com), a long-time student of Henry Hensche. I had wanted to see how she and the school approached this way of seeing and taught it. The class was better than I had hoped.
The idea was that we were learning how to see the effect that light has on the objects that we were to paint. The goal was not to have a finished painting, but rather to interpret the light and the atmospheric conditions as they were perceived by our eyes and the visual parts of our brain. Our goal as beginners was to put down the “first notes” of color that would describe this light effect. In order to do this we had to sublimate what our logical mind told us was the “local color” of the object. For instance, while a bush might be green as its local color the light of the sun or the fact that the bush was in shade could radically change the color as it was affected by the light. It required letting go of what we “knew” and responding to what was in front of us.
This became an exercise in expanding my perception of the world. To see that the whole world is bathed in light of some sort – all the time – was not only revelatory for the painting itself but as a way of seeing God everywhere and all the time. Since we are all bathed in some kind of light most of the time I was able to see from a different perspective that we are all connected by the light itself. It was eye opening from an artistic and painting viewpoint, but also helped to open up another level of entrance into this new mind that I believe we are called to in metanoia or repentance. I came away energized and confirmed in the idea that art and creativity may be a pathway into a deeper relationship with one another and with God.
This way of painting takes time and practice to train ourselves into being able to see and interpret what we have seen with the medium at hand. As artists we are called to see ever more complex relationships between the light and the object on which it lands under many differing light conditions. Someone who has studied and practiced for some time is able to distinguish, both visually and in the painting, different times of day and differing light conditions – sunny, gray, foggy. As people on a spiritual path we are also called to go ever deeper into our way of seeing God and our connection with the world.
I hope to continue to be able to mine this resource as one more entrance into our own spiritual journeys. Many thanks for your support.
Candyce Loescher+
cloescher@gmail.com
