“Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.” – Rachel Carson
Art can be a marvelous way of waking up. Our modern lives tend toward repetition, distraction, dullness, and dazed alienation – everything but feeling truly alive and awake to what’s potentially amazing and awe-inspiring all around us.
To “dwell among the beauties and mysteries,” as pioneering environmental writer Rachel Carson says, is to acquire a taste for life behind its daily frustrations and disappointments.
Even if only in stolen moments, our souls need us to pay attention to what’s intriguing, abiding, and nurturing in beauty and in nature. What calls us to the splendors and enigmas of art and nature is something beyond, something more than the workaday demands and pressures that dull our wits and wear us down.
Cornelia Hernes, The Tapestry of Life, oil on linen, 41 x 27 inches
Making art invites us to escape what Buddhism calls “monkey mind,” the constant babble of unproductive brain chatter happening inside our harried, busy brains. As common as it is maddening, brain chatter is not exempt from pressing pause. And paradoxically, the better you get at catching yourself paying attention to brain chatter (that is, the more you notice it), the easier it becomes to make it go away.
Getting lost in art, both in looking and in making, is good medicine. Drawing and painting are wonderfully meditative as they allow your scattered thoughts to rest as your hands play. Sometimes, you just need the brain chatter to STOP so you can get to the calm and quiet needed to enjoy your life. Making art, getting lost in it and appreciating it with deep looking, can help with that.
Thomas Cole, The Arch of Nero, oil, 1846
In many ways, art calls us to more fulfilling experiences. We discover, in a Madonna by Raphael or a landscape by Thomas Cole, deeper realms than we meet in daily life – deeper realms which we know exist but that we tend to ignore and forget. Great artists, through their best work, share new and yet somehow deeply familiar ways of experiencing the world with great intensity.
Losing the monkey mind, waking up to wonder and awe, “dwelling among the beauties and mysteries of the earth” are crucial in creating meaning, feeing the spirit, and finding inner peace.
If learning the techniques of classical painting interests you, join classical realist Cornelia Hernes in her demonstration video (a year in the making), Elegant Portraits.
A graduate of The Florence Academy of Art, Cornelia is adept at rendering the human form and emotive expressions through classical portraiture and mythological motifs.
Palette by Cornelia Hernes
PleinAir Salon Winner Cancelled
Tanja Gant, Cancelled, graphit
Winning the latest PleinAir Salon is graphite and colored pencil artist Tanja Gant.
Born in Bosnia (former Yugoslavia) in 1972, Tanja Gant is a hugely up-and-coming contemporary realist portrait artist who lives in Texas. Self-taught became a full-time artist in 2010 and has won numerous awards in regional, national, and international competitions. Tanja’s drawings are in permanent collections of the Art Renewal Center (ARC) and the European Museum of Contemporary Art (MEAM) in Barcelona, Spain, as well as private collections throughout the world.
Tanja Gant, Speak No Evil, colored pencil, 10 x 8.
