“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) Briefly, remember analogies I have made in the past, comparing the landscape of physical experience to the painter’s landscape — which may be dark, gloomy, filled with portents of disaster, and yet still be a work of art. In that regard, every person paints his or her own portrait in living color — a portrait that does not simply sit in a tranquil pose at a table, but one that has the full capacity for action. Those of you now living, say, are in the same life class. You look about to see how your contemporaries are getting along with their portraits, and you find multitudinous varieties: tragic self-portraits, heroic self-portraits, comic self-portraits. And all of these portraits are alive and interacting, and as they interact they form the planetary, mass social and political events of your world.

These portraits obviously have a biological reality. In a manner of speaking, now, each person dips into the same supplies of paint, and so forth — which are the elements out of which your likenesses emerge. There must be great creative leeway allowed for such portraits. Each one interacting with each other one helps form the psychological and physical reality of the species, so you are somehow involved in the formation of a multitudinous number of portraits. I simply want you to keep that analogy in the background.

(Pause.) These portraits, however, are the result of creativity so inborn and miraculous that they are created automatically — an automatic art. At certain levels the species is always creatively embarked upon alternate versions of itself. The overall patterns will remain. Biological integrity is [everywhere] sustained. What you think of as diseases, however, are quite creative elements working at different levels, and at many levels at once.

[...] The portrait is a portrait of Ruburt as a woman in one of the past lives mentioned... [...]

[...] Bega is there and I will let you tell me which portrait is his. [...] But you did not pick the correct portrait. [...]

[...] Now I want you to look at the portrait. [...] How much reality does the portrait have for you? [...]

When you have completed a life then it is as if you have finished a living portrait of yourself, using the mediums of space and time. [...] The memories and realities within that portrait are yours to learn from and to use as a model for other such living portraits in time and space.

[...] Some paint living portraits of themselves in peaceful times and places. Each living self-artist however tries to create the inner self in the material world, and each such portrait is indeed unique.

[...] The portrait is a portrait of Ruburt as a woman in one of the past lives mentioned—and in that particular instance, as a grandmother of twelve children. [...]

[...] Bega is there and I will let you tell me which portrait is his. [...] But you did not pick the correct portrait. [...]

[...] Now I want you to look at the portrait. [...] How much reality does the portrait have for you? [...]

(The following reference to a portrait concerns an egg-tempera portrait I entered into the annual Chemung County Artists’ Exhibition. I had been notified today the painting won the portrait award.)

Also, Ruburt’s conscious mind is quite merry over your portrait award, and if you both are merry then I will join in the general enthusiasm.

I had planned to go into some material concerning this particular portrait, as a camouflage construction, but here for now I will merely mention this in passing and go into it at our next session.

You are working with portraits, and portraits are of people. [...]

A portrait must contain a searching and a deep statement of the human condition, a reaching out toward the mystery that is another person, whether the person exists in your mind, or physical reality, or both. A portrait must contain a journey into personality, and the technique and the form will then follow naturally and spontaneously.

(A subject came up at break that hadn’t been anticipated; I explained to Jane some of the troubles I had had lately re my oil portraits. [...]

(After the sessions began I started a series of portraits of people I don’t “know” consciously. [...] Ideas for the portraits “come” to me spontaneously when I am mentally occupied with something else. [...]

(“Number twenty-eight: Have I painted any portraits of Speakers?”)

[...] One was a painting purchased by Carl and Sue Watkins (which, half jokingly, we had called Moses); one, the portrait of me (pause); and one that you have not completed — that the Dean (Seth’s friendly title for Tom M., one of the members of ESP class) asked about recently, of a woman. [...]

In the past, Rob’s portraits were representations of personalities involved with us personally through association or past life connections—as far as we know. [...] Lately, however, the range of the portraits has been extended. [...] Later one of my students, George, picked out the painting as a portrait of a personality called Bega, who communicates with him through automatic writing. [...]

[...] Now our living room is full of portraits of people we don’t “know.” [...] One, used in this book, is a portrait of Seth in the form in which he chose to appear to Rob. [...]

[...] He told us that a European artist had done a portrait of him while he’d been a soldier in World War II. [...]

[...] Part of your accomplishment lies in our sessions and your own considerable work with the notes, and with the invisible aura contained in those notes, for there in a different way you are painting a portrait—a portrait of two lives from a highly individualistic standpoint, extremely unique—and that is the kind of experience that would be ripped out of your life’s fabric, were you the hypothetical idealized version with whom you sometimes relate—a version highly romanticized, let me add. [...]

For example: You were pleased, Joseph, with the portrait you did and showed Ruburt, remarking, however, that you wished you had done such work earlier, and on other occasions you have made similar remarks. [...]

[...] The books make a psychological impact difficult to describe—one of course that overall presents a kind of multidimensional portrait, highly difficult to assess. [...]

(Beside the girl’s portrait sat another small portrait of a man which I’d also finished this year, early. [...] In this portrait the man looks off to one side—yet those eyes too were on the point of moving. [...]

The same year I painted my self-portrait, I painted Jane as I saw her in my dream of March 10, 1987. [...]

Robert F. Butts (1919 -): Self-portrait. 1987. [...]

In 1965, at the age of 36, Jane had posed for the two conventional portraits shown here.

[...] You can paint landscapes as if they were portraits, and portraits as if they were landscapes. [...]

[...] It is something of a new departure for me, and embodies a lot of the things I’ve learned doing my portraits for the past year or so. [...]

[...] You could perhaps at some time paint a portrait of a man who would like to sit within that landscape. [...]

Even the poorer peasants and farmers bought portraits of themselves, however, from perhaps less gifted artists, and many unknowns took payment for portraits in the form of room and board, and painted all the more slowly.

(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.^*)

[...] (The cities were) clearing houses for country artists, but many more painters did portraits of wealthy farmers and their land and establishments. [...]

[...] I have been thinking over ways to do portraits of both Bill Gallagher and Bill Macdonnel.

[...] The portrait was life-size, from the knees up, very dramatic and bold in concept and detail, and very effective pictorially. [...]

[...] You are already the self who will paint that portrait. [...]

[...] I want to clear up some points regarding your portrait of the old woman, that you are using in the book. It is a past life portrait, though the clothing is interpretive on your part. [...] There are also other portraits that you will do involving your family at that time. [...]

[...] You should go into your own ideas about the people you paint, and why, being fascinated with portraits, you often do not use models.

[...] And I can see Seth’s portrait on the back cover.” [...]

[...] Like Rembrandt had, I was painting portraits and full-figure compositions on very large canvases—even over ten feet square, say. [...] At least some of the portraits reminded me of Rembrandt’s work, in the dream. [...]

[...] (The crying.) His arms also showed additional freedom—and in many instances portions of his body moved with the same kind of ease that you experienced in your dream of last evening, as you painted the large portraits—

Now: your own complete freedom as you painted the large portraits represents your own native ability, unimpeded by doubts or by false beliefs. [...]

Your painting was meant to bring out from the recesses of your being the accumulation of your knowledge in the form of images — not of people you might meet now on the street, but portraits of the residents of the mind. [...] To some extent, when you paint such portraits you are forming psychic bridges between yourself and those other selves: Your own identity as yourself grows.

(After supper this evening Jane read some notes I’d written recently, in which I speculated about why I paint portraits — my “heads,” as I call them — out of my “imagination,” instead of using live models of “real people.” [...]

Now you are dealing with emotions, working with your portraits. [...]

(Here I referred to the series of portraits, most of them not finished, on the shelf in my studio.)

[...] The man reminds Ruburt personality-wise of your mother, hence his dislike of seeing the characteristics so similar in the male and younger portrait.

[...] 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. [...]

(Jane sat in her rocker facing the living room wall upon which hung my oil portrait of Seth. [...]