Meditation for creators - Painting as a gateway

As a casual aficionado of meditation I have always enjoyed it, but rarely in form of siting down on a mat, loosening my body and floating away in my mind while swooshing away any random thoughts, that might occur while I was meditating. It never did it for me, but I did do, and still do pre-sleep meditation, where you pretty much lay down, loosen up and meditate into sleep (this is also a great way to get into lucid dreaming). But I have found that one part of my work does give the same effect as meditation.

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Untitled III, 2015, 100 x 120 cm, acrylics and charcoal on canvas.

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I have been painting since I was 16 (by which I mean deliberate painting not making stuff with colours, finger-painting or the like, when one is a child). And after I got good at it, I stopped thinking about what I was doing a lot of the time I was brushing colours on the canvas - sure you have the occurring casual thought what colour would go well with this one and so on, but even those eventually subsided and now when I paint, after 5 or 10 minutes into work, my mind goes silent. This is an incredibly interesting phenomenon to me, as it is not different from meditation - at least the ones I have tried, and I guess most meditations are just different ways of reaching that peaceful mindfulness. So I was intrigued by this, as I do paint abstractions almost exclusively, and have put most of my time at the academy and after into learning to paint without thinking (to say trying to let the unconscious mind flow on the canvas - but I'm realistic about such romantic statements, the unconscious mind is called what it is for a reason and I do not believe any form of training can fully reorganise the two minds to switch places. I mean more than 35 million years of evolution can't really be altered with a few years of sitting down and not thinking).

And so this process of not-thinking while doing has brought immense pleasure to me, as it did a good job of reflecting the underlaying processes, that were going on in my mind at the time of painting, and revealed traces of them in the form of colours, shapes and strokes, that I would use while painting.

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Untitled IV, 2016, 120 x 100 cm, acrylics and charcoal on canvas.

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So my thought is, does anyone else use painting in such a manner to get into a state of transference, and use said transferred information in for of the painting/drawing/sculpture, that has been made, to reflect on what is going on in the mind at that time. I myself have made quite a lot of progress in the pacification and alleviation of acute issues, that I had at various times, just by painting and then reflecting on the work. If nothing else, it is much easier to look at something outside of yourself and judge that, as compared to trying to judge yourself.

The later is just about pure abstraction and for myself such a way of introspection doesn't work at all - it's just too hard to really see what's going on if all you can see is the mind's image of what you think is going on. But with a picture it's different. You can see the strokes, the rough, thick colour application or the deep violet and blue tones, that you don't really know, why you had put them there, but as you gradually peel the layers of paint, and strokes, and shapes, you begin to see that a lot of it was just a reflection of what is going on inside. And this evidence makes wonders in affirming ourselves that the issues or thoughts we have are real, that the problems we have been presented are there, they manifest before us. And while we weren't consciously depicting them (figuratively speaking, of course we kinda were!), we can now consciously read them and decipher the best way of fixing them.

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Guernica Melting, 2015, 100 x 70 cm, acrylics and charcoal on canvas.

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Here I see a beautiful potential of self-reflection. Maybe we are down because of the lack of new works that we produced as an artist in prior months. Why not use exactly this lack of work as a catalyst for change and start painting one small, quick painting a day. Or a small sculpture out of clay or maybe a quick sketch or croquis? Not to make it to be good, but just to get it out there. Making 10 or 50 bad ones, and then taking just a minute or two to reflect on them. Not to judge the quality of the drawings, the form of the sculpture or any quality, that would make us decide if what we did was good or bad art. But to inspect the thickness of the lines, the colours used in the painting and the roughness/smoothness of the clay. To take a look exclusively at our traces in the work and to use those traces to reflect upon ourselves.