painter painting alone

ART AND MINDFULNESS: Art can shock us into the present moment

Last updated: November 1st, 2018

My high school art teacher always encouraged us to work quietly on our projects. The purpose of this, she said, was to tune out the left brain, the logical, rational side and to allow the right brain, the artist within, to shine through. After the buzz of conversation and activity from gathering painting materials, the classroom would settle into a quiet lull. Soft music would play in the background. We would be encouraged to pay attention to our respective projects, and just let it flow. At first this seemed like work, and yet another instruction to follow in a class that was supposedly promoting creative freedom. But after a few minutes of actually paying attention to the feel of the brush on the canvas, the smell of paint, the sound of the palette knife scraping as I mixed and blended colours together in pursuit of the perfect blue or red, something would shift. The classroom would fall away. It was just me and my paintbrush. I was the paintbrush—we moved in unison. I felt the rough canvas underneath me, the cool sensation of being dipped in paint, the warm breath, as I leaned closer and closer to the canvas, paying attention to some detail.

Fully immersing ourselves  in a creative project activates a different part of our brain. We lose track of time and our surroundings. Minutes blend into hours, and there are no thoughts apart from what’s happening in the present. It’s very much an exercise in mindfulness. I didn’t know it at the time, but my high school art class was my first taste of meditation, impermanence and being in the moment.

The right side of the brain is associated with creativity, intuition, visualizing, emotions and daydreaming, among other things. Most of us don’t use it enough because we’re socialized to be logical and rational, thinking in terms of rules, goals, planning and structure. But, we can tap into that creative right brainart is just one of the many ways of doing so.

In 2010, American performance artist Marina Abramovic performed a piece entitled The Artist is Present as part of a larger retrospective for New York’s Museum of  Modern Art (MoMA). The piece consisted of Abramovic sitting in a chair at a table, inside the museum. She sat all day, every day, from the time the museum opened until it closed every night, for months on end.

Visitors to the museum would line up for a chance to sit across from her. There was no dialogue. There was just the sitting. Some people would sit for a few minutes, others would linger. One man came to sit with Abramovic 21 times over the course of the exhibition. When asked why, his response was:

Sitting with her is a transforming experience—it’s luminous, it’s uplifting, it has many layers, but it always comes back to being present, breathing, maintaining eye contact.

Many people cried. Sitting across from Abramovic stirred up a range of emotions for them, but their experience really came down to the same thing. The experience of sitting with Abramovic was, for many of them, one of letting go and dwelling fully in the present moment. This was, after all, New York: a city where nobody has time for anything. People are always running around, moving on to the next thing, and here is this woman, in a museum, and she’s just sitting. Their curiosity attracted them to the seat across from her.

Art can wake us up from the dream we normally live in. Art can shock us into the present moment, and true art does this without having to try too hard. It does this by simply existing. Marina Abramovic understood this when she was creating her performance piece. She knew, instinctively, that she wanted to create a space for people to just be, without expectations, without judgments and without having to hurry on to the next thing. So she sat, and the people came and sat with her.  They sat, they breathed and they experienced the wondrous, intense feeling of being presentmany of them, perhaps, for the first time.


image: Pedro Ribeiro Simões (Creative Commons BY)
  1. A beautiful, insightful post about the mindful practice of creativity – another reason that highlights the importance of having a vibrant arts culture within the education system. My first experience with the power of meditation and mindfulness was in my grade eight drama class – something I’ve always remembered.

    Thank you!

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