Learning to Look
Art and Mindfulness
By Terry Glaspey
Claude Monet, The Magpie, Oil on canvas, 130 x 89 cm, 1869
One of the gifts that art can offer us in our world of chaos and confusion and busyness, is to help us stop and catch our breath—to slow down in midst of the hustle and bustle and spend some time contemplating the things that really matter most. This has often been the goal of great painters and poets—to ask us to notice the world around us, to put a frame around a moment, thereby signifying its worthiness of our attention.
Claude Monet's "The Magpie" is one of my favorite impressionist paintings. It exudes the very essence of peace and quietude. Here he has captured a moment of absolute stillness in the wintry French countryside. We see a solitary magpie who sits atop a ramshackle gate, surrounded by a stone wall which is, like the trees, covered in a blanket of snow.
Looking at the blue-grey shadows that stretch upon the almost undisturbed ground, you can feel the chill of this winter morning. As I gaze upon this image, I almost expect to see my breath, cloudlike, as I pull my coat snug around my body. I can almost hear the soft thud of a clump of snow dropping from the branches above. I stand transfixed. If I pass over such a sight too quickly, I will miss the gift that it is.
We can just glance at a painting like this Monet masterpiece, and then move on.
Or we can learn to look.
We can stop and pay attention, notice the small details, and let the painting do its work upon us. Learning to look at a piece of art can teach us something about how to look at all the beauty and wonder that surrounds us every day. It can teach us to wake up, pay attention, and take note of the aura that often surrounds even the most ordinary object, an aura which mere words prove too weak to describe. Gazing at such a work of art can teach us to be "in" the present moment.
The truth is that we spend so much of our time thinking about the past and worrying about the future that we can lose touch with the present. One of the things that art can do is help us learn to be immersively present in the moment.
This moment, right now.
And when we awaken our sleeping senses, we are blessed with the opportunity to experience the world as we've never experienced it before. Some refer to this state as the state of contemplation. Others call it "mindfulness." Whatever words we might use to describe it, it a practice that will heighten our spiritual longings and enrich our lives.
If you are a creative person, you can use your gifts to be a pointer toward the beauty and mystery that surrounds us all. Like Monet and every other great artist, you can capture and hold people’s attention by the work you create, inviting them to see the world anew as they see it through your eyes. You can be, as it were, an alarm clock to wake up their slumbering soul.
As we come awake to the world around us, we can find God at work in the ordinary and the mundane, and we can discover His revelation in the simplest things. In his classic book, The Sacrament of the Present Moment, the spiritual writer Jean-Pierre de Caussade reminds us that God is speaking to us every moment through the things we see and hear, and through the experiences of our lives. The present moment is one in which we can experience the Presence of God if we are willing to be attentive, and even the most seemingly trivial things surrounding us might just be mouthpieces for Him to communicate with us. But the problem is that we are often not listening.
Looking at art (and creating it) demands patience and paying attention. And so do our lives, if we are to learn from them. In his wonderful book on prayer, Letters to Malcolm, C.S. Lewis reminds us: "We can ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labor is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake."
May we learn to remain awake, to embrace the sacrament of the present moment, and to experience the rest and revelation that come from taking notice of all the glory that surrounds us. Through the beauty of art and the beauty of nature, God has something to reveal to us. The question is: are we listening?
Terry Glaspey is a writer, speaker, and a professor at Northwind Theological Seminary. If you want to learn more about how the arts can enrich your life, read his book Discovering God Through the Arts.
Painting courtesy of Wikiart.