Ways to Participate in the Experience of Art

Background: Art as Self-Discovery
Conscious Observation
Contemplation 1: Exploring Your Emotional Response
Contemplation 2: Identifying with Art Elements
Contemplation 3: Drawing Deeper Insight
Meditation: Art as a Means to the Source of Aesthetic Delight

Background: Art as Self-Discovery

Art gives visual form to objects, substantiates ideas, conveys concepts, and evokes emotions and feelings. The subject matter of an artwork transmits energy through the colors and shapes used. In addition, the artist and the viewer infuse their own energetic power of understanding, appreciation, delight, and imagination. Through a work of art, the viewer and the artist meet. The artist's creative impulse joins with the viewer's creative perception to generate an experience of self-discovery.

Different artists painting the same object yield different aesthetic and emotional results. Each piece is imbued with the unique intentions, feelings, perspective, experience, and vibration of the artist.

As viewers, we contribute to the art form by bringing our awareness, unique associations, and personal meaning to the work. As we tune into the deeper intention of the artist, as well as our own unique response to the art, we expand our experience of aesthetic delight. In addition, the greater our awareness of our response to art forms, the more the artwork can help reveal previously hidden or unexplored aspects of ourselves and expand our perception of the world.

The more abstract the art form, the more we draw upon imagination and intuition, which guides us on a journey of the hidden or shadow side of our personality. As light is shed on these aspects, we gain greater self-knowledge.

Shapes, textures, and colors affect us on a subtle, emotional, and psychological level. As children, we naturally make associations with different shapes as a way to understand and discover the world. Our first drawings show these early revelations. Often, as we age, we lose sight of this intuitive, associative way of seeing. Exploring artwork can rekindle this natural process as we make conscious associations with imagery and unlock the deeper hidden world within through art.

Below are several ways of exploring art. The artwork under Coiled Energy and Inspirational theme Series lends itself well to the following methods.

Conscious Observation

In general, art forms communicate more on a subliminal and emotional level than spoken or written language. Art fosters access to deeper planes of consciousness, opening us to new ways of seeing, thinking and feeling. Through the process of conscious observation, we gain insights that help us have greater understanding of ourselves.

Make an Intention
First, make a conscious intention to know the shadow side of your personality. Without an intention, your observation is often limited to entertainment and enjoyment. While enjoyment has its own valid purpose, the process of inner discovery using art requires a firm intention to engage with the artwork for this purpose. In this way, we forge a dynamic, personal relationship with the artwork.
Observe a Specific Art Element
Next, focus on one element in the piece, such as a shape or color. Ask yourself questions such as:
What meaning does the shape or symbol hold for me?
Is the location in the picture area important?
Does the color have meaning for me?
Is there anything that seems hidden or not included?
What feelings arise when I focus on this element?
What associations arise when I focus on this element?
Contemplate Your Emotional Response
Next, investigate the quality of these feelings. Depending on one's sensitivity to art forms, the element or aspect of the artwork that attracts your attention first or longer generally has significance for you. This attraction evokes feelings -- strong or subtle. Sometimes the feelings may produce mental images, which, too, reveal something important.

By exploring the emotions the imagery evokes, you uncover the shadow side of your personality through intuition, a vision of an image, a sense of knowing, or a dream. To expand your exploration, you can use this process for the other shapes and colors in the piece.

Contemplation 1: Exploring Your Emotional Response

Here is a simple method of contemplating an artwork:

First, get a deeper sense of the artist's approach and use of symbols by reading about the artwork. For example, read the accompanying article associated with the works of art located under Artwork.
Next, notice whether an image, color, shape or texture has special meaning. If a shape or color attracts your attention that art element has greater significance for you.
Now, contemplate the feeling associated with the shape or art element. The explanation of the symbols given in the article is helpful, but the meaning behind the feeling is personal.

Contemplating the feelings evoked by the different art elements and symbols in the work reveals hidden aspects of our personality.

Contemplation 2: Identifying With Art Elements

Another contemplation method is to identify with the imagery. For example, think of the hands in the piece entitled, Elements of Gesture, as your hands. Then, investigate the feeling associated with each hand gesture. Do the same process for the other shapes, colors, and art elements.

Contemplation 3: Drawing Deeper Insight

This contemplation leads to an experience of stillness from which deeper, non-analytical insight emerges.

Investigate all the components and mentally record your emotional response. Do not be overly analytical and try to figure out what things mean. Enough information in the accompanying article is given to serve as a guide. Just record your inner response without being judgmental. Sometimes, the emotional impression is subtle and difficult to describe. In this case, whatever impression occurs is fine.
Look at the image with soft eyes allow the whole image to envelope your field of vision. For example, focus on the eye of the serpent in the piece entitled, Power of Action. Record what happens. If you look at the image long enough, parts of the image will move, shift, decrease and increase in size. If tears come as the result of long viewing, close your eyes and rest in the quietude that follows.

Meditation: Art as a Form of Aesthetic Delight

In meditation, you bring the mind to a one-pointed focus through mental absorption on a point of focus. Mental absorption, whether it is in a form, such as in visual art, in sound as in music, or in other ways, quiets mental activity, revealing the experience of your essential union with the one all-pervasive consciousness, a state of inherent bliss.

According to Vijnanabhairava, an ancient text on yoga, you can turn a sensuous joy such as listening to a song or seeing a beautiful object into a means of yoga (union with one's true nature). In this text, dharana 50, verse 73 states that when you become absorbed with the incomparable joy of song, artwork and other objects, you identify with the incomparable joy (rather than the object of perception) because of the expansion of our mind. (1)

This dharana (focusing technique) establishes that through sustained focus on the delight that arises from a particular sense, such as seeing or hearing, the rapturous experience becomes detached from the object of perception – the experience alone exists. In this way, you become increasingly established in the ever-present, independent delight of Self – a state free from attachment to sense objects. Through this practice, you recognize that the true source of aesthetic delight is the inner Self, not the sense object itself. Through this practice, you experience your essential nature of pure bliss.

Vijnanabhairava or Divine Consciousness, Jaideva Singh, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, India, 1979, pp. 69-70.

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