“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Forget the idea of man’s work and what your paintings should (underlined) provide, and the idea of fame or success. Let yourself go with the joy of painting what you want to; but forgetting also, again, the idea that your paintings are working out problems, technical or not.

You wanted to express now the fuller inspirations that come later, and with an exquisite sense of form that Josef never learned. The sense of form incidentally will, mark my words, emerge in a new way for you, but even the information given that so upset you had its purpose in your whole plan.

Van Gogh, for your information, was (underlined) obsessed personally with ideas of self-mutilation, and underwent great inner torture. He chose those feelings however so that he could view the world and reality in a certain light. That light enabled him to do what he wanted to but could not fake: paint the world through that particular unique vision.

Wheat fields for example, filled not only with the vitality of sun and growth but bristling with creativity that (in quotes) “destroyed” each part of itself in death, that was transformed instantaneously into a new spectacular form in which the creativity and destruction were always apparent, and yet one in which violence was necessarily turned into life.

Personally then he took upon himself what you would say perhaps were great problems—too great for the personality to handle, but his inner tendencies for self-mutilation always kept his vision true to his main image of the world.

Van Gogh was true to his vision, which means he was true to the self he created for himself in that time, and so must you be. But you must also have faith in what you have done, for it was all done in faithful rendering of your view of reality (in quotes) “at any given time.” And therefore the fact for example that you withheld certain kinds of emotion from it is not a failure.

The repression however was to remind you of freer patterns that would and could flow. A landscape is not lacking because it is not a portrait. They are two different kinds of things, but you would sense the different kind of thing. Now. The repressed emotion itself is apparent in your past paintings. It is something that you cannot try to put into them. You cannot fake it, and so you did not fake it.

Let the image in your mind flow imaginatively onto the board. You often think so in terms of the problems to be worked out that you concentrate upon those, in your terms. Do one of two things if there are distractions. Admit them and quite freely allow them to go into the painting freely, or firmly tell yourself that you will not allow them to divert you. But take one stand or the other.

I will make a comment about the painting before I leave—and not one you particularly earlier expected. But there is the utterance beginning to speak, the face about to move, the eyes about to brim with feeling.

And then we will return next time to dictation. But you are both doing well.

(11:22. The portrait discussed above is one I recently finished after many attempts. I nearly discarded it several times, and even now realize its shortcomings. I “saved it”, and learned from it, but it of course bears the scars of the struggle. It’s serving as the basis for new work and ideas also. The long-haired man facing the viewer’s left.