When form, matter, light and colour help us recognise the structural unity of perception and representation—in which none of these elements can exist in isolation—we begin to understand how psychophysical energies change and transform as these aspects change. The practitioner can guide this transformation, or metamorphosis, towards the elevation and purification of energies. At this stage we focus above all on inner changes, reducing—or seeking to overcome—the separation between consciousness and the world. The painting becomes inseparable from the practitioner's inner movements, and aesthetic concern increasingly becomes a matter of felt experience rather than images. This profound inward turn leads us to paint directly within ourselves, beginning from an outside that has now become an inside. We no longer paint with the eye alone, but with the whole body, relying especially on interoception and kinaesthesia among the senses that guide our actions.
The language of art
The contrasts perceived by our eyes—between light and shadow, between forms in space, and between colours—produce reactions. These reactions are simply activations of the circuits of impulses constantly moving through our bodies. Their intensity changes according to stimuli received through both our external and internal senses. Having worked with resonance up to this point, observing and describing since the first workshop what happens within us in response to aesthetic phenomena, we are now well equipped to recognise our psychophysical changes—our energies—in relation to what we see and what we do on the page and in our minds during the complex, self-reinforcing process of drawing and painting.
Thus we no longer paint only with our eyes but with our whole body. Tensions, relaxation and emotions, which we recognise through proprioception, begin consciously to guide our aesthetic activity, changing how we think, feel and see the world—and, above all, ourselves.
Beauty, perhaps understood until now as appearance, increasingly becomes something substantial. We begin to experience its emotional, physical and intellectual dimensions as harmonious, unifying and coherent.
In this workshop, attention is directed above all towards this particular inner experience of unity and coherence between what we think, feel and paint. The eye gives way to the body and its energies. We paint by arranging energetic charges, seeking whatever raises the level of energy from below upwards. The task is to direct forms, light and colours from within rather than from without, guiding them through resonance towards the higher energies of the mind, starting from the lower energies of dense, vegetative and sexual life.
Artistic and Technical Objectives
To develop the ability to guide painting towards an elevation of energy. To relate forms, light and colours to specific energy centres. To understand the energetic map of the human body.
Existential Objectives
To understand the relationships between aesthetics and psychophysical energy. To work with attention and energies.
Spiritual Objectives
To seek a connection with the deep forces underlying the formation of the universe and of ourselves as human beings.
Workshop TopicsThe Siloist energy map of the human body; directing psychophysical energies; subtle resonance.