When You Are Facing What Is Beyond Belief, First-Sit

When You Are Facing What Is Beyond Belief, First-Sit

There are moments when nervousness arrives,  particularly when a situation feels beyond my control. Over time, I have learned a great deal about myself by facing these situational challenges directly, calling upon The Golden Key as needed, as a deliberate advantage to my spiritual mind. What results is a very calm concentration. A settling.

This process of First-Sitting — a devotional meditation practice — is a daily event, called upon whenever deeper focus-through is required. Devotion makes the miracle occur perceptively, and as a whole, that means a great deal.

It would be difficult to describe what it is like to live inside my mind, or how many trains-of-thought I must sever — in tandem with breathwork — simply to arrive at presence. I have learned to pin my thoughts against the inside of my cranium, and when I am ready to attend to them, they are always ready to line up and begin anew. With that said, I will make a fair attempt at describing what has been arriving during recent First-Sitting sessions.

On Seeing

I have been reflecting on what exactly happens when I gaze at a monotone or variegated surface — and sometimes right into the air before me. What I see when I First-Sit and gaze are entire landscapes.

When I begin to dig away at graphite or painting pigments, something else is already there: a whole other picture waiting beneath. I see picture over picture over picture, all embedded within an overlapping Matrix of Lines. Holding my concentration upon the invisible lines that simply appear upon the surface, I copy what is there, focusing on one line at a time, first sketching.

Michelangelo spoke to this. He expressed the belief that a sculpture is already completely formed inside the stone, and that the artist's task is simply to discover it by chipping away the excess material (Gayford; Wallace; Hirst). This is very much the truth of my own visual art practice — I am a painter, and I do not invent so much as I uncover.

I do my best to copy correctly, and I have studied the artistic practices of painters I admire, Ingres and DeKooning. I want a visual composition to survive the looking-and-copying process, and often this is the case. Final work frequently utilizes all dimensions of the mind available at once, resulting in crowded images of varying depth that I experience as collectively subconscious characters, whose appearances allow me to enter their stories.

On Meaning

Taken together, I have been considering my own visual and envisioning processes as invaluable tools: tools for seeing compositionally and for reading the real meaning of things — in both visual and written material.

First-Sitting is not only a spiritual practice. It is, I am learning, the very ground of how I make art and interpret life.

~ Pranam ~ OM ~ aMEn ~

7/6/26, 2:20 p.m.

Works Cited

Gayford, Martin. Michelangelo: His Epic Life. Fig Tree, 2013.

Hirst, Michael. Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame, 1475–1534. Yale University Press, 2011.

Wallace, William E. Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and His Times. Cambridge University Press, 2010.