2012.07.08 _ 89

Lovely photo Sam...tempted to paint it but would be so hard to capture that delicacy. Eliza, I'd love to see some Dali paintings in RL to get past the usual surrealist stereotype of the melting watch and his flair for self publicity. I saw a Picasso exhibition in London 3 years ago and was astonished at the beautiful colours and variety of his work, so unlike the cubist image. We have to look deeper than others descriptions I guess (spiritual bit :) )

/me smiles @ Zen re "spiritual bit".

In the 7am session we talked about spontaneous conditions evoking moments of presence, vs contriving these sorts of conditions. This has stayed with me all day because contriving could be seen as a kind of stimulant, and one wonders whether there are then side-effects from that... rise and fall.

Hana used the phrase "invite but don't chase" ...

The thing is, doing nearly anything that falls outside of habitual defaults, could be seen as contriving, and there is also just setting a stage as integral.

I remember discovering many years ago, when going around the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, that there's a crucial optimum distance for viewing the paintings of great artists. It may vary from painting to painting and from artist to artist, but find it and you suddenly see the painting in a totally different light. It becomes lighter, richer, deeper, more meaningful.

This came as quite a shock to me. I hadn't read about this effect before then, nor have I since. It seems to be an independent discovery. But now I always experiment with viewing distance when viewing original paintings live. (It's not something that seems to happen with prints.) And I wonder if I'm seeing it as the artist saw it at the time.

This evening saw me in the Lokeshvara temple, calling up the meditation at an odd time!