What is the sound of one painter painting?

2.) Where did the coal sleep before it woke to its darkness? -- Pablo Neruda

3.) Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die. -- Basho

4.) When you paint spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots -- just paint spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots. It is not yet painting spring. -- Dogen

These four Zen thoughts, extracted from last year's 365 Day Zen Desk Calendar, I have presented to ArtExercise for the challenge. Each one presents its own pathways of artistic inspiration. Each one inspires a different feeling. I will talk about two of these sayings this week and next week the other two. For this week however, I will talk about numbers 1 and 4.

Dogen was pretty profound, in my opinion, especially about art. When you paint spring, paint spring. Many people will see this and think a rose is a rose. If you can’t paint the things of spring then what can you paint?

I think the point that Dogen was trying to get across when he expressed this pearl of wisdom was that we shouldn’t get caught up in the parts of something when we are talking about the whole. For instance, let’s say we paint a Grandfather clock. We don’t usually spend time painting the gears, the springs, and all those things inside the clock when all we want to paint is the clock as it appears from down the hall. It goes against the nature of the visual aspect of the object to put every piece of the object into our art.

When we paint a meadow, we do not paint each individual blade of grass, we paint patches and give the impression of grass, or give the impression that there is more grass there than what we paint. Dogen tells us not to focus on each blade of grass, because each blade is not a meadow by itself. In the same way that each peach, plum, and apricot does not mean spring. Only as a whole and all together do the blades of grass make a meadow and only as a whole and with many other things do peaches, plums, and apricots help to make up spring.

Focus on the whole of what you are painting or creating instead of focusing on each part as if it were the entire painting. Paint each part as if it is focused towards the whole. A painting is a whole piece of art and not several separate pieces.

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