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Posts Tagged ‘Meditation’

Quiet Revelation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 2, 2025| 1 Comment »

Quiet Revelation– At Principle Gallery June 13, 2025

When the brain is completely quiet, it is empty. It is only through emptiness that anything can be perceived. You need space, you need emptiness to observe. To observe you, I must have space between you and me, and then there is seeing. So, a mind that is crippled with sorrow, with problems, with its vanities, with its urge to fulfill, and frustrated, caught in nationalism – you know, all the petty, little things of life – such a brain has no space. It is not empty, and therefore it is utterly incapable of observing. And when a mind that is being petty and shallow says, ‘I must explore,’ it has no meaning. It must explore itself, not whether there is something beyond itself. So when the brain is completely quiet, empty – and that demands astonishing awareness, attention – that is the beginning of meditation. Then it can see, listen, observe. Then it will find out if there is something beyond the measure that man has made to discover reality.

–Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), From Public Talk 10 in Saanen, Switzerland July 1963 

Quiet the brain. Empty the brain.

Such a difficult task that feels like it should be easy, given how much space is actually occupied up there. Don’t be offended– I was talking about my brain. Not yours. Well, maybe a little about your brain.

I don’t know.

A big part of my work has to do with finding this sort of quietness, of stilling a mind reeling from the ceaseless bombardment of stimulus that this modern world serves up. My search is often futile with only short interludes of true quietude. Perhaps, as the philosopher Krishnamurti points out, by consciously searching– a product of a brain filled with the petty and trivial– I was actually preventing myself from actually observing the quiet that is always present.

I’ve been somewhat aware of this, often saying that my work is at its best when the brain is taken out of the equation, when I just let things happen on an instinctual or organic level. Getting there is much like the quieting or the emptying of the brain that Krishnamurti describes. A difficult task.

This new painting, Quiet Revelation, reminds me of the appearance of one of these rare moments of quietude. For me, the Red Tree here seems to have been able to block out the clang and furious rumble of this world, elevating to a point where it can observe the reality and harmony of the animating force that is just beyond our measure.

This energy source of which everything is comprised is the theme for my upcoming show, Entanglement, at the Principle Gallery. I see this piece with its quiet harmony, as a fine example of coming across that meditative stillness which is being sought, a feeling I experienced for a time while painting this piece.

And that’s always a gift. All I could ask for in my work.

Quiet Revelation is a larger painting, at 36″ by 36″ on canvas. It is part of my annual solo exhibit — this year marks my 26th show at the Principle– of new paintings, Entanglement, that opens less than two weeks from today, on Friday, June 13 at the Principle Gallery with an Opening Reception from 6-8:30 PM.

The day after the show’s opening, on Saturday, June 14, I will also be giving a Painting Demonstration at the gallery. The demo, my first there, should run from 11 AM until 1 PM or thereabouts. Hope you can make it either or both events.

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Biding Time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 19, 2024| 1 Comment »

GC Myers- Biding Time 2007

Biding Time, 2007

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
What is there to be or do?
What’s become of me or you?
Are we kind or are we true?
Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.

–William Empson, Just a Smack at Auden

I feel like we are in a period of waiting right now. I don’t know what exactly, but it feels like we are kind of frozen in place as we wait for something to happen that will put everything into motion, for better or worse. Like we are waiting for someone to push over that first teetering domino.

Maybe it’s just me in feeling this way. Maybe it’s just the time of the year as we enter the holiday season and I am reminded of the intolerable waiting for Christmas’ arrival when I was a kid.  I am not quite so eager for whatever surprise is in store for us to arrive as I was then.

But whatever it is or isn’t, we– or maybe just me– remain somewhat frozen in place, biding our time. Finding a way to get through this waiting period is all we– or I– can do.

That brings me to the painting at the top, an older piece from 2007 that is titled Biding Time. I used to periodically paint pieces like this that were extremely simple and quiet. I viewed them then and now as meditations, as a means to finding stillness amidst the surrounding chaos. I haven’t painted one in quite some time for reasons I can’t determine which is odd because I always found most of them quietly effective., remaining in my mind for long periods of time.

This particular piece has not been shown publicly in many years and I thought it was time for it to make an appearance once again. The time seems right. It is headed to the West End Gallery tomorrow, in time for their annual Deck the Walls holiday show.

FYI– The verse at the top is from William Empson, a friend and colleague of poet W.H. Auden. In the poem Empson both pays homage and pokes a bit of fun at Auden while capturing the anxiety of post-WW II Europe that was struggling to gain its bearings amidst the nuclear threat that had risen.

Let’s have a song to go with such waiting.  Here’s a favorite, Waitin’ Around to Die from the late Townes Van Zandt.  This is from the 1976 documentary Heartworn Highways, a film that captured the beginnings of the alt-country movement of that time.  This clip features Townes singing to his girlfriend and his neighbor Uncle Seymour Washington, a retired blacksmith born to ex-slaves.

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Not Quite an Island

Posted in Influences, Painting, Quote, tagged , , on March 25, 2013| 4 Comments »

GC Myers- Not Quite an Island When I awoke in the middle of the night, as I wrote in the last post, I had a piece in my mind that I really wanted to start on.  It was simply a causeway running out to a piece of land, an almost-island.  That was all I had in mind.  I held no details on the island itself or even how the causeway would look, just an idea of a strip running outward.

This is the piece that emerged, a 16″ by 20″ canvas that I call Not Quite an Island.  The title is based, of course,  on the famed piece of writing from John Donne that begins with  No man is an island and ends with Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.  It’s often portrayed as a poem but it’s part of a sermon, Meditation XVII, from a book of his sermons  titled Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Donne was writing on the interconnected nature of the world, how one man’s suffering was the suffering of all men, that the death of any man somehow diminishes the whole of mankind.

I saw this piece as being about the impossibility of ever truly detaching oneself from the outer world.  As hard as we might desire to seek  isolation from the world, we always remain connected by virtue of our own humanity.  And the causeway here represents that connection to me, a lifeline to the larger outer world with the path that runs along it up to the Red Tree almost serving as a root nerve connected to the larger spinal cord of the world.  To cut off that nerve, that connection, is to lose all feeling.

It’s a simple painting but the simplicity of it actually reinforces the message, in that the image makes a striking and easy first impression.  There’s a meditative quality here, an easy flow and harmony to this piece that brings my eye back to it again and again.  It’s actually just as I hoped it would be when I got out of bed at 3 AM a few days ago, filled with anxiety.  In its way, it has alleviated that angst.  For the moment.

As it should…


					
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