“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At supper time this evening I explained a few problems of a technical nature, connected with my painting, to Jane. I believe I have solved some of them, or at least am embarked on the right course after a very long period of trial and error. They involve mostly portrait work, and such mundane things as the handling of paint, both opaquely and thinly, and the symbolic meaning behind these things. I told Jane I wasn’t asking that Seth go into these this evening; I preferred that he talk about Jane or the Sumari work. I made the extra effort to explain these concerns to Jane because I feel it’s part of the resurgence I seem to be experiencing since we made the decision that I leave Artistic at the end of this month.)

The distortions grew so great that the whole structure crumbled. Many artists relied upon the stereotyped constructions of their age, rather than looking within for their own revelations, so that art could have become the frozen art form—painting could have—that showed clearly the spiritual immobility of a people who finally grew dry.

In your sketches you allow complete freedom. The sketches sketch themselves through you, so let the paintings paint themselves through you in the same fashion, and miracles of technique will follow automatically. No problem of technique will exist, in other words.

Read again the material I have already given you, the suggestions on your paintings. You can use purple or violet with too heavy a hand, and the brown becomes lost then. Rise up the importance of yellows or colors signifying light. Let them shine through. Do not smother them with opaqueness.

Let your preliminary sketches be as spontaneous as your ink sketches. Then imagine the colors as appearing from within, not applied from without but shining through. Remember the incredible individuality and integrity and possibilities of each line. You can sometimes forget this in your painting sketches, while you are quite aware of it in your ink sketches.

(This is excellent material, as I told Jane. I explained to her after the session that I wasn’t sure about the reference to purple or violet, which I seldom use directly because they are hard to integrate into a painting—at least for me. By the next day, I may know why Seth made the reference. The reds I use, being cadmiums, can take on a decided violet cast when mixed with white. This must be kept under control. The painting I am working on now features a cadmium red shirt on the subject, and has given me some trouble because of its tendency to turn purplish if not watched; since Jane has seen me at work on this portrait often, she may have picked this up, although I haven’t mentioned it to her. I did explain to her before the session my dislike of too brown a cast to features—this was one of the points we discussed, as mentioned earlier.

(The idea of letting the painting fill itself with color “as blood fills the body” is excellent.