Impressionism and the art of dissapering.
Impressionist movement.
Impressionism was a movement created by a group of artists in modern Paris, where they were trying to break free from traditions. In traditional art, during bygone era, people appreciated paintings which closely resembled what they saw in real life. In a time where photography was not an art this really makes sense as perhaps the drawing was the only way of creating what eyes could see. However, artists including Cloude Monet, Edgar Degas and Camillie Passerio, did broke free from traditions by painting what they could see instead of drawing what their minds wanted them to see. By doing the former they achieved the latter goal anyway. So, impressionism was closer to a meditation than painful replication of reality in academic painting and realism.
How impressionism art is created.
It is really interesting to watch an impressionist artist at work. Imagine you are trying to paint a tree. If you are an artist of the past, you would try to replicate the tree, like a photograph by creating each individual leaf closely resembling the actual tree. So there would be only greens and browns in your painting. But impressionist would approach it differently. They would ask questions like, what am I seeing? Do I see a tree or light and dark areas, with little bit of green + violet+ yellow and white areas? Do I see some orange on the trunk of the tree? How does orange changes to light green of the background? They asked what does this moment and piece of bark of the tree look like Instead asking What is this object look like as a whole" There is a subtle change in these two questions. In the first case we paint our observation, without giving a name to the object we see. Instead of a Ballerinas, in the case of Edgar Degas or lotus in the pond in the case of Coude Monet they created light and dark shadows. And this is clearly visible as when you look very closer to these paintings, they make no sense as there are only thick brushstrokes with different colors. Only when you observe them from a distance that you would see a Ballerina or lotus in a pond. Instead mixing colors yellow and blue on the palate they would paint these colors alternatively on the canvass and use Optical Mixing which happens in the eye of the observer, to create a shade of green. Just like in a way the modern LCD screen works.
The art of disappearing
This is the name of the book by Ajan Brahmavanso, a Buddhist monk from Australia. He describes how observing the nature is like an art and how mindfulness would make oneself understand their own nature, like an impressionist artist understand the object they are painting. Not just by looking at it as a whole but by carefully considering what things are composed of, we would see, in mindfulness, the ordinary observations become less meaningful but just a work of the brushstrokes of an artist who is living behind our eyes and between our ears. Ultimately describing how to dissolve ourselves in the experience of the now moment.
Now consider the quote "one must know how to lose oneself in order to find oneself". This quote attributed to Edgar Degar captures the essence of the impressionist art as well as mindfulness practice. I could not stop seeing the remarkable resemblance of this quote to "The art of disappearing" by the mindfulness teacher. Really speaking, in impressionist art we are losing ourselves in color, light and dark shadows, in order to rediscover a tree, a ballerina or a man sitting in a boat. But in that moment of each brush stroke the artist does not see such an object but just tiny part of it with specific interaction of color which she replicated on the canvass.
In mindfulness we live with the experience moment to moment without making stories out of it. Without crying when you dropped your favorite meal on the ground, you observe your greed which made you buy it in the first place, you observe the pieces of food on the floor, once which looked tasty now looking disgusting when mixed with dirt. You see the attachment which turned into dislike in a matter of seconds due to composition of the experience. You observe the reaction of the observer to whole situation, and the grief. Once done move onto the next experience of cleaning out the mess. In this sense, everyone could be a possible impressionist artist and master the art of disappearing into the experience. Would you try that?
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