“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt’s reading in college, and his friends there, led him to believe that the artistically gifted were not too well equipped to handle normal living. [...] He did not realize that the people he knew — Nelson Hayes, for example, and Mauzet—were not basically artists, in this case writers. [...]

In that framework, you each found yourselves artistically gifted. [...]

You had highly conflicting ideas about “the world of working people” and the world of the artist. [...]

[...] Your own are obviously not limited to art, per se, or art would have satisfied you so completely, and taken your attention so completely, that you would not have looked in other areas at all, so there is a place meant for you, in which your artistic—meaning painting—writing, and intellectual capacities form a synthesis in which all those abilities take part, and are fulfilled. [...]

[...] You chose to concentrate on artistic endeavors as you grew and learned through various areas and periods — that is, you tried and enjoyed sports, and writing; and after a while you decided upon the painting self as the particular focus upon which you would build a life.

[...] The sportsman, the writer or the artist — any of them would utilize that background differently, but well, and in such a way that it peculiarly suited each of them.

[...] The writing self became latent as the sportsman did, yet the writing self and the artist were closely bound. [...]

Artists use perspective on a flat surface to try to capture there the feelings and experiences of depth that are, in themselves, alien to the flat canvas, or paper or board. The artist may vividly evoke the image of a disappearing road that appears to be broad in the picture’s foreground, only to turn smaller and smaller until it seems to vanish in some distant hidden point. [...]

[...] This perspective cannot “work” at your usual level of consciousness, any more than the artist’s perspective will work for the ant’s — though there is much you could learn from an ant’s consciousness (intently). [...]

[...] When an artist paints a picture, he uses discrimination. [...]

The artist knows that many pictures can be painted, and holds in mind paintings already produced and those in the planning stage as well. [...]

That area has also suffered because of your joint ideas of what artists should be like, and what men and women who happen to be artists should be like. [...]

You have made rather sharp definitive divisions between the artistic world and the business world. [...]

[...] As a rule, however, it is foolhardy to expect them to have a sense of the artist’s values, whatever the art may be, and then to become upset when they do not live up to that picture. [...]

Now, of course they think of books as products, so it seems to you that they should think in terms of the best products, in the same way that you might think of a best painting—but when you think that way, you are still projecting artistic characteristics where they do not fit. [...]

You take your artistic ability on trust. [...] There are people highly gifted with artistic abilities, who have never trusted those abilities, did not consider them a part of themselves, and practically speaking have been unable to use them.

[...] Your artistic endeavors are the result of trust and expectation. [...]

One had to do with the in quotes “problem” of artistic creativity versus womanhood, and this along with personal background brought about a distrust of the feminine organs. [...]

Now when your idea of truth, or art, or artistic integrity, is connected with detail then the charged areas show themselves. [...]

In the second dream (on April 4, 1979), Bill Macdonnel, whom you do not consider an excellent artist, reflects your own sometimes confused feelings about what might have happened had you devoted your work primarily and exclusively to art, or played the artist, as Bill does. [...]

[...] You cannot compare artists, for each is gifted in a different way.

In the next scene, you have the introduction of the artistic ability, however, personified by your friend of your younger New York artistic past. He represents someone highly gifted artistically, and therefore stands for your artistic self as you might have idealized it when you knew that young man. [...]

(3:33.) The harder you try, therefore, to force your artistic nature into the public system of beliefs, to teach it how to service cars, for example (intently), or to apply itself to the mechanical world, the more it resists, refuses the suitable apparel or turns it into private apparel—that is, it asserts its private self. [...]

(Long pause.) The more you try to live “a life of service,” or to concentrate primarily upon providing such a service, the more then your artistic self displays its private nature. [...]

[...] While artists all use the same “material” — the human experience — it is still the brilliant uniqueness or individuality pointing out and riding upon that shared human performance that makes a work “great.” [...] But all of this may have little to do with the artist’s interpretation of his own symbols, or with his personal experience, so he may wonder how the critics could read this into his work.

[...] You form your image constantly; as many of the artistic processes are hidden, so the inner mechanisms by which you create your material self lie beneath the surface of your conscious mind. [...]

[...] An as artist myself, I’ve experienced this “critical” phenomenon more than once. [...]

[...] If you read books in which you are told that a certain object always represents such and such, then you are like the artist who accepts the critic’s idea of the symbols in his own work. [...]

At the same time you threatened yourself with the possibility of complete failure as an artist, almost in retaliation. (Pause, one of many through here.) You would not (underlined) be a full time commercial artist, regardless of any old demands, though you felt still somewhat guilty at your refusal.

[...] You were trying to punish yourself for not making more money as an artist, since you still felt her old demands.

[...] Your mother, incidentally, has largely given up focusing upon your artistic career in any way. [...]

[...] I mentioned to Jane now my curiosity as to whether my artistic career had any connection with my Denmark life. [...]

(I’ve painted a portrait of Van Elver, who is the fourteenth-century artist [Danish or Norwegian] from whom Seth receives information on painting techniques.^*)

The name Wedoor (phonetic) and a Germanic firm who handled artists’ supplies then, and was also famous for the dyeing of cloth and clothes.

[...] (The cities were) clearing houses for country artists, but many more painters did portraits of wealthy farmers and their land and establishments. [...]

Your allowing the longer hair is a sign that of late you have become less frightened of the symbolically creative and feminine aspects of the artist. Your refusal in the past to look the part of an artist, per se, reflected your determination to insist upon, to you, the contrasting masculine aspects. [...]

[...] This fits in with your own artistic nature, and with your background in this life. [...]

Now that is the main reason why you have not tried to make a living as an artist per se. [...]

This certainty that you could really never support yourself as a fine artist derives its strength from that identification, and in the main from that identification alone.

[...] A great painting of a battle scene, for example, may show the ability of the artist as he projects in all its appalling drama the inhuman and yet all-too-human conditions of war. The artist is using his abilities. [...]

The artist who paints such a scene may do so for several reasons: because he hopes through portraying such inhumanity to awaken people to its consequences, to make them quail and change their ways; because he is himself in such a state of disease and turmoil that he directs his abilities in that particular manner; or because he is fascinated with the problem of destruction and creativity, and of using creativity to portray destruction.

You knew you were an artist, whether you sold or not, or whatever you did. You knew you were an artist. [...]

He wanted to protect himself against the “artistic temperament” as it is conventionally understood. [...]

[...] You were originally an artist, who turned rather dramatically into a landowner, and against your youthful ways.

[...] You wanted him to go into more acceptable work, and you were ashamed of your own early wanderings as an itinerant artist.

Here the division was set between the idea of owning property, as opposed to being an artist. [...]

[...] And for whatever reasons, in this life I have insisted upon being an artist in spite of all obstacles.

[...] Rob is a professional artist, an excellent draftsman and technician. [...] Seth says that he has no artistic ability either, but questions artists who have entered his own field of reality.

Seth did say, however, that Rob’s picture using the color-building technique is a portrait of the artist in question. (See illustrated section.) He also said that Rob would do other paintings of both the artist and his environment, including possibly the artist’s studio.

[...] He told us that a European artist had done a portrait of him while he’d been a soldier in World War II. Somewhat humorously, he described how the artist had drawn his face as though it were symmetrical and without blemish, while actually it was quite asymmetrical with an impaired eye. [...]

Seth has dropped some hints as to the identity of the artist who is passing on this data to him. According to what he’s said so far, the artist was a fourteenth-century Dane or Norwegian, and was known for his domestic scenes and still lifes. [...]

[...] The same applies to an artist, so for simplicity’s sake we will start with a single creative event—the idea the writer or artist has already geared himself, through training and practice, through intent and expectation, to receive to begin with. [...]

(9:19.) The artistic acts always directly involve strong direct interactions with Framework 2. In the production of our book we want, say, people we may not even know to come together in certain fashions to make certain decisions that will be in direct agreement with our own creative intent. [...]

[...] The artist paints because he loves to. [...]

I have given some material on that before, and it all applies, as given, to contradictions in your own beliefs between the male as breadwinner and the male as artist. [...]

(9:49.) There are qualitative leaps that exist impossible to bridge with the intellect alone that separate, say, well-meaning, adequate-enough attempts toward artistic achievement, and works that are of themselves naturally artistic exhibitions. [...]

[...] Now in the philosophical area we are discussing, you are also dealing with imaginative leaps, with casts of mind and spirit that are as rare as true artistic ability is. [...]

[...] (Pause.) You are not simply trying to look at the world differently, for example, or to change a hypothetical reality, but to creatively bring about some version of a creative and artistic vision that results not simply in greater poems or paintings, but in greater renditions of reality (all very intently.

(The idea seemed to be that creativity, mine and anyone’s, is initially playful, curious, seeks expression—and is one of the highest kinds of psychic play—the artist playing with concepts no matter what the art; and actually inserts his or her reality onto the world, superimposed upon it. [...]

(Its very difficult for the practical world—for people who aren’t primarily “artists or creators” to deal with that sort of thing; they don’t know where to place it and ideas alone make them uncomfortable—they aren’t real or unreal according to their way of looking at reality.

A very simple analogy will arise as an artist attempts faithfully to reproduce a landscape. [...]

[...] The artist would have to assemble mountains of rocks, an infinity, that is infinity of molecules, all equally impossible. [...]

[...] The artist may hint at time within his painting, but he cannot capture the physical eons that might be contained in the mountains themselves, which he wishes to reproduce.

[...] The problem would be then the same problem with which our artist was concerned.

(“Do you mean an artist?”)

(“Could you give me the name of my son, the artist?”)