Continuing with my exploration of the face’s terrain in color, with this portrait I wanted to capture Rob Rinder's lively mind, thoughtful and thought-full, as I participated in Sky Arts' Portrait Artist of the Week's livestream of former winner Gareth Reid as he sketched in charcoal the TV personality and UK barrister.  I felt as if I had received a gift being able to listen in on Gareth and Rob as each described their own creative processes, pushing each other for deeper understanding, finding kind humility in both. What lingered while I put brush to canvas this week was Rob’s deep listening as he pondered the concept of preconceived knowledge that Gareth had described of how many art students are not able to achieve a good likeness because they have fixed ideas of what an eye is, a mouth, a nose, and how that affects one's approach to seeing a face (and--I thought--our understanding of so many things in life).  It was a reminder that what we truly need to “see" is what Zen describes as “beginner’s mind."  

We are so bombarded with imagery today (TV, internet, smart phones, etc.), addicted to looking at things and human beings.  We've become numb to the immensity of it all, and paradoxically we "see" less.  Returning to our original source, our child's eye, our beginner's mind, is where we begin to discover again the truth of what it is we are looking at.  When we look as if we've never seen something before, now that eye is not something named "eye" with all our locked-in ideas about what that is, but a shape, light, dark, color, relative to something else next to it that we are seeing anew.   We want to try to go beyond the condition of non-seeing, of no longer seeing.  Not only does this help with achieving a likeness, it also brings a freshness to the process as a creator.  Maybe the artist does not even want a likeness, but now can "see" the object that we term "eye" as something else, spurring innovation.  

So I attempted to carry that spirit in my rendering of Rob Rinder's portrait, hopefully bringing a freshness, a new "look" to what we think of as portraiture.  

If this subject interests you, my blog post "Truly Seeing" goes into this a bit more.  I would be interested to hear your comments.

"There is no large no small

Infinity lies before my eyes."

Seng-T'san, sixth century

Many years ago I was driving to work listening to a CD of Buddhist mindfulness teacher Jack Kornfield.  Jack told this story and it is a story that touched me and has stayed.  I would like to share it with you.

There is a tribe in east Africa in which the art of true intimacy is fostered even before birth. In this tribe, the birth date of a child is not counted from the day of its physical birth nor even the day of conception as in other village cultures. For this tribe the birth date comes the first time the child is a thought in its mother's mind. Aware of her intention to conceive a child with a particular father, the mother then goes off to sit alone under a tree. There she sits and listens until she can hear the song of the child that she hopes to conceive. Once she has heard it, she returns to her village and teaches it to the father so that they can sing it together as they make love, inviting the child to join them. After the child is conceived, she sings it to the baby in her womb. Then she teaches it to the old women and midwives of the village, so that throughout the labor and at the miraculous moment of birth itself, the child is greeted with its song. After the birth all the villagers learn the song of their new member and sing it to the child when it falls or hurts itself. It is sung in times of triumph, or in rituals and initiations. This song becomes a part of the marriage ceremony when the child is grown, and at the end of life, his or her loved ones will gather around the deathbed and sing this song for the last time...quoted from Jack Kornfield in Path of Heart.

I began this portrait of Jack Kornfield during a Zoom livestream at the beginning of April.