“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is easier then to sense and feel the alive energy within and beneath the physical forms that you see. It is easier to feel yourself as the artist, also a part of the landscape that you paint; to sense the merging of your own energy into the scene before you, and to realize that you are a part of it also. For you paint reality from within.

You cannot step outside it for a better view. (Humorously.) It is easier to realize that the vision and the everalive energy is far more permanent than the forms. The permanency and the timeless quality do not belong to the shapes of the mountains and the trees, but to the conscious energy that forms them.

You as artist, symbolically speaking, should not step backward to see the landscape more clearly, but step into it so that you can feel it more clearly. If you sense the peculiar and overall gestalt that is beneath the form at any given time, then creation of the form will follow naturally and truly.

The form is caused by a characteristic condition of the energy at any given time. If you are intuitively aware of that miraculous neatness, if you allow yourself to be enveloped within that particular moment point, then the painting will form itself about you in somewhat the same manner that I am formed about Ruburt’s voice. But your painting of course will be more visible.

You should in any case whenever possible sketch outdoors, for you are personally renewed by such an encounter, And the implications are very different. When you are outdoors sketching there is before you a large expanse. It is easier to think in terms of size and expansion. Thoughts of expansion will help your work, so that the energy and vision are not imprisoned by form but are within form, even while in the process of change.

Pretend that the energy within that object is the center of life, so that the whole rest of the universe derives its energy within that stone or flower. Do this until you can feel that energy pulsate within the form of the object, so that the form itself is ever mobile while it retains the semblance, as in a stone, of immobility.

Think of the energy as radiating outward from the object, giving life to all other things, whether or not many specific objects are to be in any given painting. This will result in paintings in which your chosen point of attention radiates through the form, illuminating all other objects in the painting, and psychically radiating outward from the painting.

The timeless quality will be built in, for the painting itself, though flawless in form, will suggest the changing quality of form, and stress the permanent quality that gives it its meaning. If you as artist are also aware that the same energy that fills the form that you paint also forms your own image, then the transformation into something better than excellent art is made.

Now the energy can be best suggested by transparents, rather than opaques, for the opaques are too ponderous. The opaques can be used effectively to suggest the form, superimposed lightly over the transparent energy, but never with a heavy hand.

A good use of transparents in oils will make you more pleased with using them. Movement can be best portrayed also with transparents, and even for rocks. While opaques may be used to suggest physical heaviness, transparents should be used also to show that in actuality rocks are as light as air, and to hint at the ever-mobile energy that forms them.

Now oils themselves suggest the earth. The medium is a fairly natural one. Let the medium then stand for and represent the physical appearance of permanency in any object, the physical continuity of any given human form in a painting. Let transparents represent the constant renewal of energy that always escapes the form. These lift the medium itself into another realm, and the two together can suit your purposes well.

With oils again the transparents for the mobility and vitality that gives the form meaning, the opaques to suggest the idea of physical time, and to suggest the apparent (underlined) duration of form.

The seascape automatically suggests the energy that moves the ocean. Now, the tree does not suggest the energy that forms trees. It does not suggest the universe. The tree does not for others suggest more than you have literally put into the painting.

Ruburt cannot deal with form you see, in painting. He does not understand form in those terms, and never has. You can use it beautifully, as the carrier through which energy flows, and at the same time remember that the form itself is also the energy, period.

Energy fills out the sails of form. The energy is psychic and spiritual. It will endure as long as there are people to look at paintings. If you can suggest this, and you can, Joseph, then you will truly fulfill your artistic abilities. To some extent you have been trapped by the object, trying so hard to identify with it that this kind of expansion was not possible.

Having to do with him. (Pause, head down, hair disheveled.) Now as the clouds’ construction constantly changes—tonight you watched them (and sketched them after supper) so the forms of objects constantly change. (Pause, head down, hair disheveled. Eyes closed. Jane constantly rubbed her face and eyes with both hands.) We had better get Ruburt out of this for now, at least for a break. Touch his shoulder.