Fling A Fox

At this morning's Ashtanga Class I challenged myself to working more slowly and combining more than one posture on each painting. Instead of being totally focused and present in the moment of the movement I found myself uncomfortably slipping out of the state in which the pen and paint flow freely as an extension of experience rather than the result of thought.

A half hour passed and I found myself feeling as I did fifteen years ago when I assisted Michael in the retraining of his brain. Every morning and every evening we spent at least half an hour doing vision exercises that involved eye hand motor coordination while simultaneously keeping the brain busy with a slightly different activity. Each time I added a figure to my painting I had to make left-brain decisions such as where to place the next figure; what size to make the figure; what colors to use on the figure. I felt myself stiffen as I dipped the pen into the ink. After a deep breathe I relaxed and added the figure. The cycle began again with the next figure.

My routine is to pile the paintings up and not look at them again until the evening. Because I had battled back and forth between the two sides of my brain, I felt that the resulting paintings would be of a more serious nature, less light-hearted and free-spirited.

As I looked again at the painting illustrated above, I was reminded of how blinded I am by the previous experiences in my life. I can't look at the painting with any sort of objective point of view because it reminds me of an extremely absurd painting I did more than thirty years ago, an illustration for the letter 'F' in an alphabet book. The text for the illustration was "Fling a Fox". I think it is the line of movement created by the two largest figures in the yoga painting that bring to mind the flinging of the fox.

All of the illustrations for the alphabet book may be viewed at: Alphabet Book
Click on each image to see the text that goes along with the illustrations. I am amused by the fact that the illustrations were, and are, considered rather bizarre. I don't think of them as any more bizarre than the text.