“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you are sketching outdoors, as a helpful exercise I suggest the following: attach your focus of attention to one small thing. It may be a flower or a stone. Something however that catches your own eye. Imagine the energy within that object perpetual, but in terms of being endlessly alive and vital.

The meaning behind them was known to all. Each of the great masters’ paintings somehow suggest the existence of far greater realities, of which the paintings were a part. They saw the objects within their paintings as portions of a greater whole that was suggested by the painting.

Now the suggestion I have given you is the same sort of thing. There is no dependence upon agreed ritualistic symbol, however. The exercise itself will allow you to make the necessary transformation, where the one becomes all. Now this is the expansion of which I am speaking. It will cause immediate physical evocative reactions. Do you follow me here?

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 again, much of this has to do with your own interest. Opaques are excellent to suggest a heavy or dark mood. In portraits, while the inner skeletal structure must be hinted at, and while the figure should be well done, still there should be the suggestion of the personality going beyond the image, and of the personality’s energy radiating outward.

In a portrait, do the same exercise as given earlier. Imagine the individual as the center of all life, so that when the painting is completed it automatically suggests the whole universe of which the individual is part. Nothing exists in isolation, and this is the secret that the old masters knew so well.

In the smallest detail of the smallest still life they managed to suggest the reality of the spiritual universe, of which that detail was a part, and through which the energy of the universe spoke.

In itself an object should be then felt as its unique identity, and as a part of the whole universe. A stone or a flower is a very small thing. When you attach your attention say to a flower, it is not only a matter of imagining yourself as the flower, or trying to sense what a flower is. It is also to imagine the power of the energy that causes that flower to grow; and yet in a landscape you will have perhaps many flowers. They must each suggest the reality of the overall pulsating vitality that makes their appearance possible.

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.

Now. One of the attractions for others in that painting of me is that it automatically suggests an unseen audience, to whom I appear to be speaking. Not indeed a formal audience, but unseen listeners who represent humanity at large. The unseen is there. ‘The figure manages to suggest the universe of men and the world that holds them, yet nowhere literally do these appear.

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.

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.

An apple is not stuck within a tight hole of space, you see, isolated there. It makes itself out of space, transforms space, into an apple, and this you must suggest.

(Again Jane paused, at 10:13. This time she told me I had better speak her name three times, as Seth had suggested I do in a recent session, when her trance was deep. I did so now, and very slowly Jane opened her eyes, one at a time, on a crack. But, as she said later, she never really got out of the trance, and resumed at 10:15.)

Now, some of my suggestions for you this evening come from better sources than I. For as you know I am no artist.

This has something to do with Ruburt’s difficulty in breaking the trance state. (Pause.) From someone else here… Your figures, to get the feeling of depth and breadth, this is not to get the feeling simply of the flesh and bone within the flesh, but to suggest the personal energy and vitality that is in a riot, to be loose within the flesh.

This is from an artist who always used siennas for initial flesh tones, with a suggestion very lightly of violets. Built up then cleverly with (pause) transparent ochre which he had, and a particular green, muted. The top complexion tone lay on this lightly, as if a wind could blow it away, and of course he suggests this. (Long pause.