JENNIFER WALLACE
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  • About
  • Upcoming
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  • THE BEAUTY PROJECT
  • New Work
  • Photos and Video
  • Blog
  • REVIEWS

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An artist, with her eyes not looking, comes to know an owl and herself better than by looking

6/2/2017

3 Comments

 
Picture

​It’s an old art school trick meant to loosen up the literal line between eye and mind and hand and the page. “Don’t look at the thing you are drawing, but trace it with your eyes.” What you’ll get is something a little bit like the thing looked at, but
​off-kilter, unskilled.
 
Take this drawing of an owl, for example. It’s a likeness, to be sure; recognized for its owlness, not a robin or a squirrel. But it lacks realistic detail, is missing its feathers. Is primitive, primal, even. Yet, when my friend, Linda Bills, an accomplished artist very capable of rendering an owl, sent it to me, I thought mostly of the Japanese word, kokoro—meaning heart. But also mind. Heart & mind. Heartmind. This owl, drawn without looking at the page, is seen with the eyes and drawn with the heart. All those impulses shoot straight up the spinal cord, meridian, chakra highway, axis mundi…you name it. And a resonance vibrates between eye, heart, mind and hand. It probably spills back over to the owl, too. Who knows? Everything in relation and vibration. All made possible by disabling verification.
 
It’s a little like faith, isn’t it?

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3 Comments
susan berlin
6/2/2017 07:49:29 am

Nice! In the same vein - I had a migraine the other night so I was listening to TV with my eyes closed and realized that Wolf Blitzer's speech pattern, filled with breaths taken at inappropriate places, make him the Christopher Walken of newscasters. You hear better with your eyes closed.

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Mark Burrows link
6/2/2017 08:39:07 am

Brilliant, Jennifer! What the world needs--especially just now, in the midst of The Travesty who resides in the White House--is such subtle, deeply generous, searching mind-full-ness.
Thank you...

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shay cooper
6/5/2017 04:40:48 am

Striking how space and emptiness becomes fulfilling and powerful Thank you Jennifer ... keep um coming.

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    Author

    Jennifer Wallace is a poet, photographer and teacher living in western Massachusetts. Paraclete Press published her new book of poems, Almost Entirely, in November 2017 and will publish a second collection, Raising the Sparks, in 2021 

    After decades of avoidance and experimentation, she decided in her 50's to get serious about her spiritual practice and is now, mostly, happily settled within her Christian roots.

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