The Artist's Journey E8 - Art Appreciation as Sacred Custodianship: Impression Expression Abstract

Description:

The Dreaming Meets the Waking World. 

In this session we step into the quiet cathedral of an Australian garden to witness the plum tree in its brief, explosive confession. This is not merely a painting demonstration; it is a meditation on "Sacred Business" and the act of custodianship.

Join me for a 19-minute journey en plein air, where we explore how the deep time of Indigenous and Celtic lineage. We move beyond the canvas to discuss the therapeutic power of art, the shift from Impressionism to Abstraction, and the elegance of curating your own private sanctuary.

Podcast Substack Post Link

In this episode, we explore:

 -The Therapeutic Gaze: How neuroaesthetics and "soft fascination" in nature quiet the mind.

 -The Impressionist Lens: Capturing the vibration of light rather than the architecture of form.

 -Lineage & Deep Time: Finding the echoes of Celtic knotwork and Indigenous "Spirit of Place" in the twisting branches.

 -The Art of Curating: Why collecting art is an act of arranging meaning and energy in your home.

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If this piece resonates with your interior landscape, you are invited to view the finished work and explore our current collection. 🌿 Visit the Gallery: [ozfineart.au]

Start your collection and bring the sanctuary of the garden into your space.

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#ArtAppreciation #PleinAir #AustralianArt #SacredBusiness #ArtCollecting

Timestamps:

0:00 - Introduction: The moment before creation 0:35 - Understanding transience and custodianship 1:15 - Witnessing the plum tree in bloom 1:50 - The fleeting nature of light 2:18 - The art of deep attention and gazing 4:09 - St. Claire of Assisi and transformation 5:24 - First marks and the Impressionist tradition 5:57 - The Group of Seven and medieval art 6:27 - Giotto and the Franciscan tradition 6:57 - Neuroaesthetics and soft fascination 7:37 - The painting as meditation 8:05 - Squinting to see essence 8:34 - Looking for harmonies, not details 9:07 - The Impressionist stage 9:40 - Working with shifting light 10:05 - Living in the moment 10:38 - Deep time and sacred connection 11:14 - Standing on sacred ground 11:54 - Art as Sacred Business 12:19 - Celtic and indigenous connections 12:39 - Goddess Aine and transformation 13:18 - Sacred geometry and Song Lines 14:04 - Life, death, and rebirth cycles 14:19 - Weaving worlds together 15:22 - Curating art for your home 15:42 - Moving past visual recording to feeling 16:32 - Expressionism and emotional core 17:04 - Owning original art as an anchor 17:49 - The value of custodianship 18:29 - From timeless wonder to wonderful details 18:50 - Invitation to explore collections

Transcript

[00:00:00] There is a moment just before the brush touches the canvas where the world seems to hold its breath. It's a pause. Where the dreaming meets the waking world. We are here in a quiet cathedral in the Australian bush, in the garden. Witnessing a plum tree in this brief moment of time, an explosion, a confession of bloom.

This is not just a tree, it's a lesson in transience, it's a sacrament. And this act of painting en plein air is not merely about the capturing of a likeness. This is an act of Custodianship. An act of Sacred Dreaming. To [00:01:00] witness the light, to honour the land, to honour Sacred Country, and to translate these ephemeral values, these concrete and earthy values

into something permanent, into something that we can celebrate, into a painting that we admire and appreciate. Welcome to The Artist Journey. I'm your host, Dr. Jo. Welcome to our garden. This is where the dreaming meets the waking world. You're watching a plum tree in full permissionless bloom, a riot of color and texture against the Australian sky.

But what we're really witnessing here is the creation of ourselves and how we move with the [00:02:00] impressions of nature into a place of interiority. What we're doing here is witnessing. This is an act of primal custodianship. To paint en plein air or in the open is to enter a negotiation with the elements.

It's not a passive act at all. It's an action of transcendence. It's a way of coming to terms with ourselves, with understanding our identity. This is truly a sacred business. When I set up my easel, I'm not just observing the tree, I'm. Stepping into a stream of consciousness, a time between times. The light that I see and that you see on the canvas right now is actually quite fleeting.

It changes. It transcends. [00:03:00] It moves. The light moves through time and will never exist exactly in this way again. And in the same way, the tree that I observe and that I try to capture as I'm tracing the trunk lines of the beautiful, beautiful bark, shifts and changes before my eyes. And the tree itself as a living organism changes as well through time, perhaps beyond our perception of time.

So never existing exactly in the same way. Again, my role then, and perhaps yours as well as you watch, is to be the witness. And within this, to gaze upon a deeper reality. In our modern lives, we're often starved at this kind of [00:04:00] deep attention. We scan, we scroll, we glance. But art demands that we gaze. I'm reminded of St.

Clair of Assisi, who implied in one of her profound letters to a beloved friend, something akin to this notion that to gaze upon the naked Christ, the naked Jesus, is to know true love. The sense of the medieval 'gaze' was an action of the self that transforms the mind, the body, and brings us into a place of soulful resonance, where we literally transform upon this lake of being. Given what we give our time to, what we give our energy to, and how this resonates with us.

Changes us. And [00:05:00] for Claire, in her mysticism, in her deep, profound, loving kindness, and her giving of herself to her sisters and within her community, she embodied this action of transformation, this action of loving kindness.

As the first marks go down in the canvas, and even now as we deepen the colors and we provide the structure of the painting, we're engaging with a tradition that revolutionized how humanity sees itself. The Impressionists, like Monet, Renoir, and Pissaro broke the studio walls. They understood that the world is not made of rigid lines and black shadows.

The world is made of profound [00:06:00] vibrations and relationships of color. I'm reminded of the Group of Seven, in Canada, whose works transformed a whole generation and more, in our perceptions of nature. This tradition goes back profoundly deeply within history. Back to again, the medieval times. After Claire and Francis walked in

Assisi. The artist Giotto, in Italy, during the middle age, reflected on the Franciscan tradition. And his work revolutionized within this tradition an artfulness and culture that rendered the sacred within the domestic. That transformed our understanding of human relationships and our relationships with nature as a sacred place.

This is a therapeutic [00:07:00] relevance. This is in modern terms, what we call 'neuroaesthetics.' This is the study of how the brain responds to art, and this tells us that we're looking at a 'soft fascination,' which in this field of science describes patterns that are found within nature, like clouds or foliage or the tree that we're painting now- and how our brain shifts from a high beta state of stress into an alpha state of relaxation.

The painting, as an action, but also our appreciation of art, our depth of understanding of art- as this forms within our experience, as we gaze upon the painting like an icon or a window into our souls, we also enter into this alpha state of relaxation, and this [00:08:00] changes us. This gives us new perception, new meaning.

When I squint my eyes, for example, as an artist, and I'm mixing with color, I'm physically blurring the world to understand its essence. I'm moving from the structure of the tree to how the colors textures and meaning emerge. The energy of the tree comes forward in the painting. This is a lesson for the collector and for the art lover.

Sometimes you see, to actually see the truth of a thing or an object, you must stop looking for the sharp details. And start looking for the overall harmonies. You need to look for the space between the notes and how the notes interact within the music of the art. And this is an [00:09:00] impressionist stage, and it's linked to what comes next in our deep affiliations.

But the impressionist stage is a true impression of the tree, given a subjective perception, given a personal view. This is a fleeting moment. And yes. This is a window into a more pervasive truth. The sun is moving. The shadows on the tree are shifting from cools to warms to deep tones, and I have to work quickly.

The impressionism is an exercise in presence. You can't worry so much about the mistakes you've made five minutes ago. And mistakes themselves become part of the process and part of the journey and the learning. You can't worry about the finished product [00:10:00] either. You must live in the moment. You must apply the brush.

You must live with the color. And this is a truth that is. Beyond art. This is the mindfulness that we find and a philosophy that we find within the moment. What we call an indigenous cultural teachings, a deep time, a time of connection, a place that is sacred. This is where we look at light, but we see beyond it. We look at structure.

We see a fluidity of connectedness. We see the gnarled, dark wood of the plum tree, for example, twisting upward, and yet we see the vibrancy of colors and how they interact. We are standing on sacred ground. The Australian landscape is not a blank [00:11:00] canvas. It's written over tens of thousands of years of story and stewardship by the First Nations people in their interaction with the sacredness of the country.

This art is an ultimate expression of the Sacred Business. Art, not as a commodity. Rather, Art as a map of survival, of spirit and law. We paint with this profound reverence for the Spirit of Place in our Mi'kmaq heritage and the Sacred Pipe that we carry within this country speaks of the essence of the power that is found hidden within creation and with Creation's Song we sing that Our Stories Are Our Medicine.

I look at the twisting branches. I feel the echo of [00:12:00] my own lineage rising to meet the land from my Celtic origins. I'm reminded of the goddess Aine, and her giving of self. In her wings of transformation in how she combines and brings together the mysteries of life and of love, of family, and of kinship within her abundance, within her vision, within her giftedness, within her creativity and intuition.

We see within the Celtic tradition and the indigenous peoples of Australia, this understanding of the sacred geometry of nature. We see this endless line like the Song Lines. And Medicine Trails, that turn knots into [00:13:00] beautiful flowers. That are like knotwork, given to purpose and meaning that reflect back on itself- symbolizing an eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

This life, death and rebirth cycle, we see within the curves of the branch of the tree and the depths of color as they come together. This is not a straight line. Nature abhors straight lines. In fact. And lives within spirals and turns and circles. Encapturing this organic, distinct calligraphy of the plum tree-

i'm weaving with these worlds together a mystery. A timelessness. Ancient and yet true, the red and deep ochers of Australia and the rhythmic, cyclical understanding of our [00:14:00] Celtic origins, and our Aancestors, give us this sense of the beautiful colors emerging. This creates a layered experience. When you curate art for your own home, you're looking for these layers.

You're looking for a piece that holds a conversation between the past and the present. A work of art that is for you, a bridge. A bridge between cultures and eras, a bridge that anchors your soul, your heart, your spirit, your body in the moment and within your sense of creation. Art within your home, within your collection is an expression of your own personality.

And so when you connect with the art of an artist, this is where [00:15:00] you're heading. As the painting develops, you can see the shifting of colors and how things are coming together. We move past the recording of visual effects. This is a branch, for example. We have the bones of the tree. Now we're putting in the feeling. And this is expressionism at its heart.

This is the externalization of our interiority, of our internal world. The plum tree is no longer just a plant. It's an explosion of joy. It is a shout of life arising in creation. It is, the brush strokes becoming more aggressive perhaps, and more confident. And yet it is also a painting that builds on texture and creates a topography of being on the canvas.

And here we have brush strokes against the edges of abstraction. Many collectors are [00:16:00] intimidated by abstract art. But in its purest form, abstract art is a poetry of being. To abstract is to 'draw away.' We are drawing away the unnecessary details to reveal the emotional core. Think of it like music. We don't just 'do' a C major chord, and ask what does it represent?

Rather, we feel its resonance. And so here we have our completed work. Our resonance of the plum tree. Given in the truth and being of the details now, that we apply, with our smaller brush. In our world that is increasingly digital ephemeral and rented, owning your own original work of art is an anchor. It's [00:17:00] a declaration of permissionless indulgence in beauty.

It's an investment in your own mental wellbeing. Imagine this piece on your wall in your collection, not just playing a role of decor, but being a window that brings you to this garden, to this place, to this memory of your own becoming. Every time you walk past it, you are inviting a sense of pause. You are inviting a sense of memory that brings this lesson of the plum blossoms and the ripe abundance of the fruit into your own life, into your own future, into your wellness.

This is the value that we offer through Oz FineArt. We're not just selling objects, but we're offering a sense of custodianship. [00:18:00] You become the new custodian of this story. And so this is the change that is now. We're traveling a great distance from timeless wonder and over through impressionist and expressionist experiences, to a sense of the neuroaesthetics of art. And of moving from timeless wonder into wonderful details that bring us to this place. We extend an invitation. This is the philosophy of Sacred Business that resonates. We ask you if this connects with you in any way, visit our website

and explore our collections. Perhaps this plum tree or another piece from our archive will invite you to a [00:19:00] sense of resonance. If so, we welcome you to be in contact and to acquire one of our pieces. Thank you for watching and for being a part of our community of discerning individuals. Until we meet again, may your days be filled with the art of living.