Lessons from Leonardo

Today I read a bit of Leonardo Da Vinci's recommendations for young painters. I did see a drawing from him in the National Gallery in London this summer and it took my breath away. His advise was to draw the same thing again and again using an model and than do it whithout model on a glass plate. And then study where you have been distorting reality. 

I know that everyone has his or her own very particular distortions in the perception of reality. I know it from classes for studying models and from explorations of the body image of my psychiatric patients. It is very interesting to see what kind of distortions occur and that does tell a lot about the person's history and relations. 

But in art my aim is not at all to represent reality. It seems quite useless since the invention of photography. I am more like a mediavel painter, it is all about the idea and it is not about representing reality or a personal expression of emotions. I don't like to sign my work, the fact that I did create it is absolutely irrelevant. Relevant is what the work can develop independent from me, what meaning it can get for someone who lives with it. Also in that sense I am more like the pre-rennaissance artists. Tough I love the particular flavour of individual differences and the human imperfection and vulnerability. 

Painting and drawing always pushes me back towards that field of potentiality, the still undefined reality, vibrating and capable of becoming anything or capable of falling apart into nothingness. Just some colours which meet some tendencies of structures to develop or a beginning spatial organisation. 
For a year I have tried to work with more clear boundaries. edges, forms, more dense concentrations. Hoping that at some point images will develop and clarify what is pushing me to continu working. But they don't develop yet. Not in a consistent way and may be I will have to give up on that and stay with only representing that vibrational field of potentiality which I see everywhere around me. Everywhere in nature. 

When it comes to humans the patterns I can see apear rather superficial for me. A human life span is so short and after that, they fall apart to only vibration again. Memories. 

When I paint the memory of my parents it also is just colour and some open structures. For my mother earthy brown and deep red, for my father dark green and turquoise. For my mother more angular patterns for my father more flowing watery open fine structures. I loved both of them in a very different way. 

But improving the quality of perception is something I would really like.