I’m starting a ‘fundamentals of drawing’ class today. I began drawing years ago after being inspired by Frederick Franck’s approach to drawing as a way to see and to meditate. I hope I can follow his teachings and work on seeing and being present instead of creating something that I can hang on the wall.
The Creativity Book Salon read Franck’s book, Art As A Way in August, and many of Franck’s opinions were profound and controversial. I’d like to share some of his thoughts here and I’d love to hear any reactions or thoughts they spark in you. I hope I’m not infringing on any copyright. I think there’s a certain amount of excerpting you can do before you need to ask permission. I’ll try to keep it brief. If you don’t hear from me again, the copyright cops have taken me away.
1. “Art is not to express personality, but to overcome it.” – T.S. Eliot page 7
2. “During that flash ‘the artist’ died a sudden death and was no more. But the image-maker survived him, and was more alive than ever….In that flash I had retrieved the original impulse that – long ago – made me start painting: to SEE, to really see this wondrous world before I die, to make it my own…." page 38
3. “It’s seeing is that profound meditation in which the natural reveals itself as…transcendent, and the Real as sacred.” page 79
4. “It is this delusional Me that we cultivate and cling to, that becomes the ‘identity’, the ‘image’, that ‘personality’ we are so scared to let go of and that condemns us to feel and act constantly ‘according to character’, that is, according to our memory, our past.” page 84
5. “The eye awakened is the eye in love.” page 87
6. “Alfred North Whitehead defines religion as ‘that which the individual does with his solitariness.’ In this sense seeing/drawing is a religious act leading to a religious experience.” page 92
7. ”…Drawing rock, face, blade of grass, beats down the ego, for the more total my identification with what I have drawn, the more inadequate, more lamentable I find the finished product.” pages 102-103
8. Quoting Bruno Bettelheim, “Only then fulfills art its function: that of guiding the individual to a vision of the world and his place in it.” page 126
9. “If the word ‘artist’ is to retain any meaning at all, the minimum requirement to merit it should be the lifelong commitment to a craft, a discipline, as one’s central concern.” page 4
10. “With the end of the fat years upon us, the fireworks died down, we are beginning to question the validity of all this forced ‘originality’, this destructive ‘creativity’, the snobbish semantics of self-serving oracles, to reflect once more on the roots of art, to suspect that we might have to turn inward and start from zero.” page 18
11. “It requires an almost superhuman innocence and purity of heart for a painter not to be drawn into some aspect of these competitive games, and hence to become more and more estranged from his most authentic being.” page 39
12. “…To see the practice of an art as one of the ‘Ways’, in the Oriental sense of the word, namely as one of those disciplines, the tea ceremony for instance, or the martial arts, or calligraphy, disciplines by which one may attain one’s own Truth, as do meditation and prayer.” page 20
13. “The point of practicing art is less to discover who you are than to become your truth, to be able to shed all sham, imposture and bluff in relation to yourself and others.” page 139
