I sat staring, staring, staring – half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect.
When you really think about your hand you begin to realize its connection, to sense the hum of your own being passing through it. When we look at a piece of the universe we should feel the same.
Art is an aspect of God and there is only one God, but different people see Him in different ways. Though He is always the same He doesn’t always look the same...
Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness!
You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.
Inspiration is intention obeyed.
If the air is jam-full of sounds which we tune in with, why should it not also be full of feels and smells and things seen through the spirit, drawing particles from us to them and them to us like magnets?
I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb.
Go out there into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. Know that they are God expressing God made manifest.
Last night I dreamed that I came face to face with a picture I had done and forgotten, a forest done in simple movement, just forms of trees moving in space. That is the third time I have seen pictures in my dreams, a glint of what I am striving to attain.
It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw.
The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures...
Don’t take what someone else has made sure of and pretend it’s you yourself that have made sure of it till it’s yours absolutely by conviction. It’s stealing to take it and hypocrisy and you’ll fall into a hole.
Writing is a strong easement for perplexity. My life is a map, spread out with all the rivers and hills showing.
Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don’t know in your own soul.
The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.
Oh, I wonder if I will ever feel the burst of birth-joy, that knowing that the indescribable, joyous thing that has wooed and wond me has passed through my life and produced one atom of the great reality.
It’s all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it’s all the unformable things one wants to paint – essence.
The earth is soaked and soggy with rain. Everything is drinking its fill and the surplus gluts the drains. The sky is full of it and lies low over the earth, heavy and dense. Even the sea is wetter than usual!
Trying to find equivalents for things in words helps me find equivalents in painting.