When your eyes happen to fall again on the mugs you drew during our meeting, do you notice a difference in how you relate to them now? Did giving your attention to them shift your sense of intimacy with the beingness, the particularity, the realness of the things you drew?

As you look and draw, keep asking yourself questions of relativity: how long is this part in relation to that one, how much of this whole shape is taken up by that feature and so on.

You may catch yourself making aspects that interest you more prominent than they actually are, or squishing areas that don't seem important to you, without meaning to. There is no objectivity without subjectivity.

Searching for accuracy tends to be a humbling exercise, in my experience. Trying too hard to draw exactly may produce a tight, mechanical quality--there's life in the search, even if you never get it anywhere near 'right'.

Are you willing to not-know? Are you willing to estimate, make a mess, recognize where you're off and look again? Airplane navigational systems are off-course and correcting for it 99% of the time. Take a flight in your sketch book, giving attention to journey rather than destination.

If you'd like tools to map out proportions more exactly, here's a tutorial of a classic art school lesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTVuDcwIF3M (The elements of the still life they used have all been painted a flat grey to lessen distractions of tone and local color).

Pausing at the beginning of a drawing to take notes on proportions and spacial relationships can offer a satisfying sense of orientation, freeing you to explore what you're seeing without wrangling sometimes frustrating puzzles of distortion.

If you find yourself frustrated or disappointed in your drawing, check in with your expectations. Were you (maybe subconsciously) comparing your work to an imaginary ideal, or to the skills of 'famous' artists? Did you identify with the notion that a more pleasing-to-you result would make you better than how you now rank yourself?

Contemplate the role of this kind of comparison in your experience of other areas of life. Remember times when you've realized an unconditional regard for yourself, innocent of attachment to outcome. How might you give yourself more breathing room to explore and create from where you are rather than measuring yourself against an image of expertise or achievement? Even if that mental habit of comparison is robust, could you take it less seriously?

Here is an article on the principle of Innocence you might find relevant to this: http://www.stinkwanink.com/2015/06/innocence.html

As an art major at a fancy university, I had some teachers who acted dismissive and snobby, as if we should all have been born knowing how to do what we didn't know yet. The competitive culture of measuring achievement was deeply embedded there.

But I've always remembered a comment from the painter Gretna Campbell as I was struggling with a still life.  She said, "See that orange? Just love it." I couldn't get the orange to look round just then, but yes, I could learn to love it more. I can still see it glow in my mind's eye 45 years later.

Treat yourself to noticing the play of light and contrast anywhere you look. Could you try taking quick visual notes on what interests you, what piques your curiosity?

While looking and/or drawing, investigate the possibility of seeing without prioritizing your interpretation of what you see. Instead of trying to define things with your drawing, explore your direct experience of the light/contrast that all vision is made of. Let your hand respond to the dance of your eyes between the marks on the page and the view. 

Some of our inner explorations are inspired by the Open Focus Exercises of Les Fehmi--a neurological researcher who found that questions like "Can you imagine the distance between your eyes"  facilitate a shift to a more creative, relaxed brain state.

Sometimes we feel far from enjoying such an open-minded state of well-being. Fearful mental patterns of attack/defense can get in the way of exploring creative practices, even if you also long to give yourself over to trying them.

When you meet reactivity or resistance, you might want to ask: What if simply recognizing this passing turbulence of inner-world weather is enough? What if there is nothing to solve or resolve?

You could revisit the question you may have found during our meeting--the question about something you want to know that you don't know (yet). You were invited to ask yourself if you were willing to not-know this for now, to stop thinking about it or trying to figure it out, to turn it over to Not-Know Mind.

Meet this question anew. Or is there another one forming already? Touch on it lightly, like a koan. Listen to it like you hear birdsong. See where you've already enlightened yourself about it.

Would you like a quick reading on how the principle of Gentleness can help you disperse difficulties?  Check out this loose interpretation of Hexagram 57 in the I Ching Book of Changes.   www.stinkwanink.com/2020/02/gentleness.html 

Noticing

1). Can you feel the support of the ground now, through your feet and your whole body? Can you sense the constant of gravity anchoring you to this present place and time? What does it feel like to attune to the spaciousness behind, below and all around you?
 
2). Explore the habit of mentally defining, identifying and labeling things. Try  greeting whatever you see by bestowing a simple one or two word name on it. Watch how strings of association and story could spool out from identifying any thing. Gently withdraw attention from mentally traveling to what's not here. Step back to plain naming, that ancient creative play of attaching verbal tags to what you see.

What's it like to mentally step back further, to seeing what's here before, during and after naming anything? Witness the unnameable realness of the world that is 'too full to talk about' (Rumi).

3). As you walk around looking, become aware of the play of background and foreground as your attention settles on one aspect of the scene and then moves to another. See how the thing you noticed (say, leaf shadows) meets what surrounds it (say, the bright patch of not-shadow) and how they define each other visually.

Drawing

Play with defining shapes, features and things by giving attention to the space around them. Use patterns of marks that vary.

Other Media

Check out how you arrange a garden bed, a plate of food, things on a table. Play with awareness of the space around and between items.

You could write about something or someone describing them by what they are not like.

Where does your curiosity nudge you to practice with this kind of shift of awareness?

We all have deeply grooved habits of vision, so useful for life in Earth School (as Byron Katie calls it)--skills like the ability to pick things out from their surroundings and identify them. Just noticing how skillful your habits are can help loosen fixation on them and open your mind's eye to a fresh view that sees parts integrated into the whole.

There's something magic and alive about this shift of attention to a more inclusive mode, dancing foreground and background around, seeing things and the space around and between them at the same time.

Scrounge up the following ingredients if possible--adapt to suit:

a quiet, private, comfortable space to be in for an hour--for instance, could you drive and park somewhere with a fresh view or, sit in your favorite chair and see the familiar view afresh?

a way to listen to a phone call hands-free

a sketch pad (with willingness to 'waste some paper')

a few pencils/pens/crayons/mark-makers that you like

a few not-favorite mark-makers that you haven't used in a while: neglected pencil stubs, skippy ballpoints, semi-dried felt-tips.