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tags: Art Seeing
rel: The Zen of Seeing - Frederick Franck
My drawings are certainly not offered in competition with the masters of prehistory or those of the seventieth, the nineteenth or even the twentieth century. Without apology they are offered as one man’s way to draw and come to terms with his own existence.
And if this way of coming to terms with human existence is be deemed too childish, senseless or absurd, it is my belief that senseless as it may be, it is immensely less absurd than to focus one’s life on the production and sale of more and more things, or on the production of criminally insane scientific methods of destroying life in the delusion thereby to create or protect life.
The truth of drawing is another truth than that of photography. In Photography it is indeed the eye that hunts, the intuition that chooses, but it is the machine that catches, a machine so constructed that it can project an image onto a sensitive plate by means of a lens patterned on the human eye. The resulting image of reality, whatever its validity, is a Shadow, mechanically and chemically produced.
Drawing is a totally different. The whole person is involved: the eye perceives, intellect and feeling are taught.
During the act of drawing, a sleeping pauper, Albert Schweitzer, a gull, … cabbage, cardinal and leaf of grass become equivalent.
An easy way to make the acuaintance of a city is to find out how one works, lives and dies in it
- Albert Camusquote
As I became used to new york and began to draw it, I discovered it to be a gigantic studio.
We were driven out of Paradise, but Paradise was not destroyed
- Franz Kafkaquote
On Long Island one day, while drawing an apple orchard, it spoke to me, as the apple orchards at home had done. Tossed about, … I had come home. The shells of Long Island beaches restated the Dutch beaches of my childhood. That first intimation of the world’s splendor had been recaptured.
Wherever they put me, it’s all the same to me.
- Gustave Courbetquote
There’s a poem snippet here
The Leaden-Eyed by Vachel Lindsay
Let not young souls be smothered out before They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride. It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull, Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed. Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly, Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap, Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve, Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
Every tree is an individual, every rock has a personality. It takes as much identification to draw a tree as it does to draw a nude.
When there are no nudes to draw, I draw trees.
While I am drawing nature, there is nothing left in me of that notorious alienated man of our time and his loneliness. Could it be that, while drawing, I am released out of time into the ever present? That, as I draw, I participate in the very life of nature, whether in the form of a tree, a stone, or a human face?
If I just stop my car a few miles away from the city instead of speeding on like a robot, if I can conquer my inertia and walk for an hour, the earth, the water, the air and the fire, my own elements, will sustain me again: flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, primary images of my waking life and my dreams. The rhythm of surf is mirrored in my own pulsing bloodstream. The soft rolling hills are like frozen images of a quiet sea. The jagging heights of rocks and mountains are a petrified ocean tempest. Every plant is pushing through the skin of the earth as hairs push through my own skin.
Apocalypses at the Beach (nuclear vision)
… through my brain, I saw a vision.
Landscape was no more, for the land had been melted, the plants and trees had evaporated, and the animals, reptiles, mammals, and humans, vertebrates and invertebrates, had long ago rotted away. There was not even stench, for there was no one to smelt it. The still lifes of objects on tables, the nudes, and the portraits had become memories in no mind; the statues had beenpulverized.
But on the beaches, there where the sand had not been fused by direct impact, and after the tidal waves had withdrawn, lay the shells and fragments of shells from the very beginning.
Cradled on the tides, carried from the desecrated abysses, constellations of shells and flotsam and jetsam were deposited on the sands and the rocks, to be ebbed away again. Only left was that eternal landscape of the first and last things, Of our beginnings and our endings, stretching in all its triumphant, melancholy splendor.
Triumphant, for from the desolation of the tidal pools I saw life burst forth once more in groping, shrimplike forms toward a new cycle of becoming.
I rubbed my eyes and saw the beach still blazing in morning sun, the sand still prolific with living things, the ocean shimmering and throwing surplus jellyfish at my feet, the air still alive with insects, gulls, and singing birds, the children still splashing and yelling in the surf, the lovers still coalesced in motionless embrace.
It is all here still. And so am I.
In my hand a pencil in the middle of a line.