“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As for myself, I’ve been trying to get in four hours of painting each day, without succeeding, by the way, but it’s still a real treat. [...]

[...] You will compare your own life and work often in a critical fashion to artists who were obsessed with one art from the beginning of their lives, or who pursued what is really a kind of straight and undeviating course—a brave courageous one, perhaps, and highly focused, but one that must be in certain respects (underlined) limited in scope and complexity, not crossing any barriers except those that seem to occur strictly within painting’s realm itself (all intently. [...]

(Pause.) Now you have always from childhood drawn or painted, and in that regard there has been that constant interest. [...]

You also ignore the fact that even the kind of painting you do could not be done by anyone else, and contains within it the raw material of your own unique and natural experience with life, and no one else’s.

[...] Not as easily understood a product, perhaps, as a series of excellent paintings, not as easily categorized—and yet you are helping to paint a giant-sized picture of the psyche as it translates inner reality into the living fabric of the world.

[...] You could have done conventionally well, with portraits, and with other kinds of paintings, with your technical knowledge, but as you learned more you kept trying to put more into your paintings, ever demanding more of yourself and of the art, and forcing upon yourself a kind of growth and development that in a way became larger than the art itself—so that the art, you felt, could never be adequate as an expression of the inner realities of which you became more and more certain.

Art was art, but it was also on your part a search for truth through the medium of painting. [...]

Some of your paintings will be very well-known. [...]

(This morning I quit painting at 11 AM to go to the bank and the stationery store. [...] The pendulum told me my situation was related to the fact that I stopped painting early, the windows, my worries about Jane, my age—the whole bit, in other words, so that I ended up thinking I’d accomplished precious little over the years. [...] I simply wanted to help Jane, live quietly, and paint with some kind of passion I’d always envisioned but never achieved. [...]

[...] I’d wanted to work on it this morning but had postponed doing so until tomorrow, so I could quit painting early this morning. Strangely, the spasm episode in the dream involved the color effects I knew I’d get when I glazed the painting: I was vividly aware of the texture of the underpainting as the green color was altered into flesh color by the overlay of warm flesh colors in oil.

[...] This noon, for example, after going downtown, leaving your painting, you found that Ruburt wanted a few more windows done, and the innocent window became a symbol, combining the idea of chores with your fear: if anything happened to you, who would do the chores for Ruburt? [...]

(Through last week, also, Jane had enjoyed a burst of painting activity after a rather long time away from it. [...] I thought her work was better than ever, surprisingly so, and that her ideas were good and her extremely personal handling of them in paint very fresh. Jane persisted in thinking of her paintings as childish.

[...] The reason that his paintings upset him is that they reflect his inner knowledge, of which he is well aware. [...] But the paintings, especially the late ones which are so much improved over his earlier efforts, are new to him. [...]

[...] I was pulling out some of Jane’s drawings and paintings and showing them to Bill, and Jane, Bill and I were animatedly discussed them. [...]

[...] You are now free, and you will continue to expand your abilities, in your painting and other aspects of your life.

[...] People don’t want to buy a painting. [...] People come in here and look at my paintings, but I don’t see them buying any. People don’t want to pay good money for paintings.”

[...] I’m concentrating on selling paintings.”)

[...] I do not mean a false Pollyanna-type love, but you must feel that the paintings will bless them, and that you in turn accept the abundance in terms of money which will return to you.

Give me a moment. (Pause.) The idea of the ad (to sell paintings) is a good one. [...]

[...] I also carried paint pigments, or what ended up as paint pigments. [...]

(I’ve painted a portrait of Van Elver, who is the fourteenth-century artist [Danish or Norwegian] from whom Seth receives information on painting techniques.^*)

(In Chapter Eight, Seth had said this was my way of trying to see models for my paintings. [...]

(I also learned that no particular painting of mine was involved, nor were my efforts to project this afternoon; that the survival personality was unknown to me, and that the pendulum couldn’t tell me who the personality was.

[...] He is hurt when people do not buy your paintings off the walls, and angry at anyone who mentions liking a painting without offering to buy it.

[...] The slowdown however gave him ambiguous feelings, lest success on his part meant further time from your own painting, which you would resent; so that in that respect continued success at tours would be at the expense of your valued painting time.

[...] You were not yet in the throes of your illness, and he felt that this represented the last straw to you—that it was not that good a book, not art as you thought your paintings to be, and yet it was published.

[...] The three-hour period may include painting if he prefers. [...] The feeling of creative pleasure as he paints, and follows the impulse, relieves his mind, takes it off his body, and automatically regenerates other creative impulses. He will go through several paintings and then tire of the activity, and want to write.

[...] With that, however, he has been able to paint and type. [...]

He received excellent ideas the other night, for Seven, after painting all day. [...]

Let us look at his painting. [...] Forgets how much he loves to paint, and considers all the problems involved in a new technique. [...]

(The session started late because Jane became so involved in a painting after supper. [...]

[...] I’ve begun a small painting of this last subject. [...]

[...] She’d been upset about her painting too, of course. [...]

We will take that painting for an example. In our analogy, the painting while framed within a given space, expanded. It did not spill out into the room and yet the trees can be imagined to grow taller, the background to add in distance and perspective, the water to flow; and yet there would be no impression made on the back of the painting.

(See the 43rd session, page 4. Jane now pointed to a painting I had finished a couple of years ago; it hung over our divan, above the couch. I had used Jane as a model, and in the painting she stood by a river, beneath trees; across the river could be glimpsed a village.)

Examination of the back of the painting would show nothing. The elements of the painting would expand in the same way that I have told you the universe expands, in a way that has nothing to do with space but of value fulfillment, which has its own kind of depth and perspective, and which exists not only behind but within the construction of matter.

[...] Do you remember our imaginary painting that hung upon the wall?

Painting is as natural to you (underlined) as breath. [...] (A smile, leaning forward, for emphasis, etc.) Paint with the same confidence and belief with which you breathe.

[...] The painting I’ve done of Seth hangs on an inside wall of our living room. Jane saw Seth’s painting move, intact, to and then through our large center window in the living room.

(The gesturing hand in the painting beckoned to me in three-dimensional form, Jane said, as the painting moved through the window—this was a clear invitation to me to project, accompanied and guided by Seth. [...]

[...] The photos were of Jane and of the painting I did, in oil, of Seth.

[...] I specifically suggested painting for several reasons. I want him to paint steadily at the easel, as mentioned, where he is standing, but with his attention directed elsewhere, and because of the particular refreshment painting gives him—the release from work and pressure.

Another point I wanted to make about your painting. [...]

[...] Some of the people you paint are real, but you do not know them. [...] You are dealing with personalities, some far different than your own, and forming these into paintings.

[...] The personalities behind the people that you paint now run about that room of yours, and you try to put them into your paintings, and to make yourself strong enough to contain their reality, and you feel that Ruburt does not understand this. [...]

(“Do some of those personalities know they are being painted?”

[...] Underneath they know there is a communication, but they do not realize they are being painted as such. [...]

A painter puts part of himself into a painting. [...] An artist loves his painting. [...]

A painter does not look out of his creation’s eyes into the room upon whose wall the painting hangs. [...] It is the framework in which you have your experience, created by you as the artist gives his paintings their dimension.

(11:44.) The features in a portrait are painted on canvas or board, but your soul is not painted on your body. [...]

The trees in a landscape painting cannot physically move with the wind that may blow through the three-dimensional room. [...]

[...] You painted a picture, showed great improvement in so doing, but you did not start out with crooked brushes. [...] Ruburt is trying to paint a new physical picture of his body from himself. [...]

When you thought of the kind of painting you wanted to do you did the same thing. [...]

[...] It’s of one of my imaginary male heads, and I began it a week ago, following Seth’s material on art for me in the private session for April 9. [See Note 1 for the last session.] I explained to Jane that even while it’s incomplete, the painting contains improvements that I can already tell will be developed further in the next one. Once I start a work in a certain mode, it becomes somewhat set in that expression; this is inevitable if one is to ever complete the physical painting. [...] I asked that Seth comment upon the painting tonight if he cared to.

(To me:) Your knowledge knows how to flow through the techniques you have learned, to use them and become part of them, so that a painting emerges with a spontaneous wisdom. [...] That is what the painting shows. [...]

[...] They should mix and merge with your brushstrokes, so that the idea of your subject matter is almost magically contained in each spot of paint, and that is what you are learning. [...]

[...] He has been painting lately, quite happily anticipating the next painting period, yet at the same time worried that he is not writing instead; or when he does write on Seven, he does so because he thinks he should. [...] He did give in to the impulse to paint, however. The painting is providing a mental rest, aiding in the coordination of hand and eye, and allowing him to work at certain inner challenges in a different way. [...]

[...] New intuitional insights grow while he is not thinking in those terms, and if he trusted his nature more fully he could enjoy the painting more while also realizing that other levels of the self had their own reasons. The impulse to paint, therefore, fits in with the same kind of spontaneous “discipline” that is so magnificent in the activity of the body.

(Before the session I described to Jane my dream of Wednesday, December 6;and the second vision I had, of another painting, on the evening of Thursday November 30; the first painting vision being the one of Bill Gallagher on November 28,1967, and discussed by Seth in the 382rd session.

The paintings you saw are realities, already created by you in other dimensions, and existing as potential forms in this dimension.

One has already been painted in this dimension in your future, I believe this is the first, mentioned somewhat earlier. [...]

[...] The paintings have come from other portions of your personality, who know better than you what you can do. [...]

[...] You feared so strongly that the symptom could stop you, even from painting, that the fear itself became a detriment for positive suggestion. [...]

[...] If you wanted to stay home and paint all day badly enough, then it would hamper your hand motions at work. [...]

[...] Your deduction you see was false—the earlier deduction that it threatened the painting.

[...] When an artist paints a picture, he uses discrimination. [...] Everything within the painting fits; so in your physical lives, you do the same thing.

The artist knows that many pictures can be painted, and holds in mind paintings already produced and those in the planning stage as well. [...]

[...] An ant crawling upon such a canvas would hasten across just another flat surface, and be quite unaware of the inviting avenue and any painted fields or mountains.