“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You naturally express your nature through your use of the channel of art. Your ability to draw upon that channel is endless. The certain-amount-of-ability idea is highly limiting. It forces upon you a sense of responsibility to use what you have, while instead it should mean simply being what you are, and being what you are (underlined) will automatically produce excellent paintings.

You have to let yourself go and paint. In your early life you learned the discipline of form, most necessary. The knowledge of form is one that many never assimilate. You were giving yourself a thorough foundation. The framework, learning the form first, was adopted for several reasons, having to do with other existences, to some extent given.

Your knowledge of form now can work for you automatically, serving to give structure to those ideas which will come to you freely and clearly. Your own (in quotes) “psychic abilities” now give you easy (underlined) access to inspiration. You must forget the idea as you have it, that your painting must serve to work out problems. In that framework you set problems.

The paintings are to provide illuminations which are the result of questions and not of problems. You know enough technically to solve any such problems in those old limited terms.

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 ideas in paintings that do not come in youth, and to merge a particular kind of understanding with a particular kind of form. You had an existence in which your art matured early, as Josef in Ruburt’s Seven. You dealt with emotion unrestrained by discipline, and with the feelings of a young man. Josef was not able to paint anything worthwhile past the age of 40, and he turned to a land-owner’s province.

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.

His “success” (in quotes) was no success to him. The illumination that makes great paintings, again, has nothing to do with time. A man may work for nearly a century and not attain it, or it may come tomorrow afternoon.

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.

The paintings therefore speak in themselves of the unspoken that wishes to speak, the hidden that wants to be revealed. One of your purposes has been to express just that.

You also wanted your work to show and express those mysterious moments when the rivers begin to flow (underlined), the heart learns to speak. The rain begins to form. You wanted to express in painting then the freeing of emotions—that could not be expressed unless first there had been repression, and those energies in full blossom that have nothing to do with age.

You place too great a burden upon yourself when you consider your ability something that must (underlined) be used. It flows through you naturally. Many spontaneous ideas for paintings and sketches you automatically reject because of several reasons. They do not fit in with your ideas of work (underlined), or with your idea of what you think you ought (underlined) to do, or because you are being too ponderous, and hence shove away many spontaneously playful ideas.

Now give us a moment. You must recapture the feeling of painting for fun. The play of the gods: your natural expression. Instead you project ponderous ideas of success or failure, consider work as a series of problems to be solved, and forget the idea of spontaneously creating.

Do not think so in terms of stages of paintings and their execution. See the complete painting as you want it, and have the faith that it will look that way. Instead you are overly concerned with the stages it will go through, or must, and this is inhibiting.

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.

The image therefore of yourself standing with the knowledge of the unspoken, the unexpressed, on the verge of new expression. The painting on the verge then of coming alive.