Painting A Pathway Home

By Ross G. Drago

Painting A Pathway Home focuses with penetrating insight into the process of painting as a spiritual practice. This is no how-to-paint book, but addresses how the painting process delivers us energetically closer to our deepest spiritual nature as Awareness seeking self realization through painting.
Drago's understanding of the act of painting as spiritual expression takes painters to a level of working with their art, that is at once new to us all and as ancient as the beginning of art itself. From explaining why and what the cave painters were doing to the impact of Pop Art upon a young art student, and on to recognize the manifesting power in all artists, Drago articulates the spiritual dimension of the creative process. This book belongs beside every painter's easel as proof that being an artist is not something one faces alone. If any artist doubts her or his power and influence upon society, this book will erase that doubt and empower all forms of creative expression.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ross G. Drago
• Release date: Dec 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301826629

Ross G. Drago

Ross G. Drago was born in Buffalo, the son of well known Buffalo artist Ross J. Drago, whose painting of the Buffalo skyline is on the cover of Buffalo Boy. Ross G. Drago is a painter, writer and inventor of an energy symbol language which he uses in his paintings. This language describes human relationships in energy terms. Drago received a B.A. Degree in painting and sculpture at S.U.N.Y. at Elmwood in 1964. Drago moved to Berkeley, California in 1967. There he founded and is Director of the Energy Art Studio. Ross G. Drago is the author of several books on human energy consciousness, and editor of on-line Paint Rag Magazine.

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Painting a Pathway Home

by

Ross G. Drago

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Ross G. Drago

Discover other titles by Ross G. Drago at

Smashwords.com

Buffalo Boy

Sky Mind

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1- Art as a Tool for Manifesting

Chapter 2 - Awakening -Falling Less into Trance

Chapter 3 - Painting as a Recording Plate of the Artist's Awareness

Chapter 4 - Equilibrium

Chapter 5 - On Color

Chapter 6 - On Form as Energy

Chapter 7 - Painting and Presence

Chapter 8 - Control Reality by Controlling Artists

Chapter 9 - On Texture

Chapter 10 - In the Tension Between Context and Content Lies All Meaning

Chapter 11 - Creativity and Spirituality are One

Chapter 12 - Our Old Work Still Works for Somebody

Chapter 13 - The Energy Medium of Self Expression and Energy Functional Art

Chapter 14 - Many Lives, Continuity of Self Expression

Chapter 15 - Overcoming Creative Block

Chapter 16 - Playfulness : Prelude to Creativity

Chapter 17 - The Energy that Comes with a Great Idea

Chapter 18 - Artists in Relationship

Chapter 19 - Artists: Masters of Relativity, Teachers of the Absolute

Chapter 20 - Artists Live Many Lives in One

Chapter 21 - Overcoming Resistance to Stepping Out into the World with Your Art

Chapter 22 - Accessing a Creative Past Life

Summary

Preface

Painting a Pathway Home is an attempt to clarify to the visual thinkers and spiritual seekers that the act of painting is a continuous means of bringing about spiritual Awakening. The works of art that the act of painting leaves are windows of opportunity for a receptive viewer to gain tremendous spiritual ground in their own journey toward a realization of their true Self.

As with Awakening Itself, no words can describe the teachings intrinsic to that state, and no words can teach what painting itself teaches. Indeed, I have found through a lifetime of painting, that Painting Itself Is A Master Teacher, an intelligence that works with whoever opens himself to this spiritual act. This Masterful Intelligence and compassionate teacher used to be referred to as The Muses, but has since lost its meaning in the new aesthetic of manufacturing a disposable world. This new world of disposable objects is devoid of consciousness of the living spirits in objects, in places, and even in processes such as painting. To believe that there is no living spirit in things and processes, places and planets and, yes, even minerals and elements such as iron and oxygen, air, fire, and water, is a man-made convenience blind spot designed to facilitate indifference to the world we are in, allowing us to manufacture from, instead of have relationships with, our earthly world.

I write this book with the intent to make as clear as I can that, aside from the creation of works of art, painting is a natural awakening process. Not only does it awaken the artist to the true Self, the conscious witness of oneʼs life and world, but it simultaneously celebrates Being this Awareness. It is for this reason that with every power structure throughout human history, it is the artists who are first captured and controlled through force or economic sanctions and gains by the new power. Controlling the artist controls the direction in which reality unfolds. This book is an attempt to remind the creative souls that within them is the power to transform this world, blighted by a judgmental mind set, into an experience created by a receptive heart. Painting is, above all, Beholding.

Chapter 1

Art as a Tool for Manifesting

Originally, the process of allowing an image to unfold was of the highest spiritual order of things. It took place in caves, such as those of Lascaux and Altamira, depicting bison and other animals that a tribe hunted or needed for winter survival. So important was this hunt to the survival of a tribe through harsh winter, that it aroused in people their highest abilities, the ability to physically assure their survival and a good hunt through literally manifesting bison. It is within the human spirit to have the power to manifest what it is we need. Our world, made from mud and stone, water, fire and air, is a monumental testimony to that ability. All that we see has been manifested by our desire to make this new aesthetic come into being. It came from the hearts of dreamers and artists, just as the cave artists manifested prey to stay alive.

In Altamira, the artists went deep into the caves, to the pitch darkness of the Sacred Void Itself, from which well spring all expressions of Consciousness. There, kneeling in the Void, a tribesman passed a flame close to the roughly textured walls of the cave, slowly moving from here to there. The artist (the one who made visible the invisible world of spirit) watched the wall, until he or she saw the spirit of a bison or a horse suddenly appear. Quickly he brought this spirit down in frequency through the use of black and brown stones, red and ocher stones that crumbled and left their marks, each stroke delivering this ethereal (as yet in the Ether) Bison Spirit down in frequency to the lower vibration of the physical world. (I have no doubt that along with the visual artist was a music maker who beat a drum of lowest vibrations, to assist in transforming the spirit frequency down into the material frequency through rhythm and deep drumming sounds.) This is why it never mattered that one bison was drawn or painted superimposed over another. This was not a visual work of art, it was a manifestation process. Wherever the spirit of the next bison appeared was where it had to be drawn, regardless of what was already present. These spirit-capturers even brought life into the animals through animation, using superimposed imagery to capture the animals in motion. It was in this ritual manifestation that the first artist captured as it has come to be known, the spirit of his subject. It was a literal fact, a captured spirit.

In the world outside of the cave, they had already struck an agreement with the bison whom, outside of time/space, they had manifested. It was now willing to give itself back, for having lived its life to this moment, and they knew which bison they had manifested because it was the one who stood there, willingly returning a life for a life. This was the original power of the image, and it stands as such today.

As this ability to manifest what we needed to survive became forgotten, so did the instruments of taking the manifested bison change from sacred ritual tools into actual weapons, designed to bring an animal, or later a human, down against its will. In this way, weapons became symbols of those who lived in fear, rather than trust in our power to manifest our needs, and their ritual nature was transformed into what we have today, a world almost totally devoid of conscious manifestation for the sake of benefitting the whole, into a world of unconscious manifestations, manufacturing goods that are regarded as soulless, without spirit. In this manufacturing world, there is only the way of the will. The artist remains true, difficult as this may be, to the way of the spirit as a more powerful means of staying in harmony with his or her world. To be creative is to live in a state of trust rather than fear.

As this ability to manifest what we need faded in our memories, so the role of the artist began to shift as well. No longer was the artist a key instrument in human survival, through the power to manifest what his or her society needed, but was now a means of recognizing and celebrating the human spirit at best, and at least, a way to decorate a wall. Yet, this ability of the creative soul to manifest reality has always been dominated by those who took power. As the Catholic Church gained power, it seized the artists and literally forced them into the service of the vision the Church put forth over all of the pre-existing visions of reality. The Catholic Church absorbed the artistʼs reality manifesting ability into the service of the Church. Without Papal approval, both the artistʼs work and the artistʼs life were in danger of being decreed heresy. This was a death sentence. Symbolism was controlled absolutely. "This saintʼs hand shall be held in this manner, with a white dove facing in this direction. His feet shall be standing upon a serpent of the color green, and in the heavens…"So went the commissions of the artists who were saved by the Catholic Church to create a vision of each story, so as to manifest this reality in the hearts of mankind. The Church had never forgotten this ability of artists to manifest new realities, and if a secret exists within the Church, it would surely be that they controlled the power to manifest the very reality we lived in through controlling the creative spirit of the land.

When the Church yielded its power to the musculature of the corporation, the artists were shifted from representing the Church in order to stay alive, to representing manufactured products and services as their only creative avenue for reliable income. Newspapers, then radio, and then television as writers and actors in commercials, became the artistsʼ way of staying alive consistently enough to raise a family on their talents. Their new orders were no longer the Holy Orders of the Vatican, but came from the Corporation. Still burned into my mind from the Milton Berle television show when TV first appeared, were the men from Texaco. In this advertisement, the shiny new automobile pulls up to a gasoline station pump. Instantly six or eight men dressed in Texaco uniforms with police-like hats dance out and surround the car, each tending to his specialty, one wiping the windows, one polishing the car, one checking the oil, one pumping the gas and all in unison singing, I wipe the glass, I check the oil, I fill the gas.. moving on to Oh weʼre the men from Texaco, we work from Maine to Mexico, thereʼs nothing like this Texaco of ours! …Tonight we may be showmen, tomorrow weʼll be servicing your car!

The very idea that it was these dancing, singing men who would be servicing my fatherʼs car if we went to a Texaco gasoline station was astounding to me as a young boy. That is the power of reality-changing, and it comes from the artists who wrote music and choreographed a visual performance designed to lift any viewer into joy, but alas, it was the joy of using Texaco gasoline and having your car filled with gasoline. We all - or some of us, at least - know by now, , where filling our cars with gasoline leads us as a manifested reality. This was followed by the reward of proudly presenting, "Milton ----Berllllllllllllle!. (WHISTLE – APPLAUD!)"

Today the artist working for industry depicts a world of happiness in old age because of this product or that, and misery without it. Automobile ads and pharmaceutical drug ads are crammed shoulder to shoulder between the acts, where we are given snippets of theater as a lure to stuff our hearts with something beautiful. Ironically, the programs give us absurdity and fun, love relations in turmoil, or fear and terror, while the ads give us sound reason and the joys of life we are hoping to find in the programs we watch. While this is still true, many new commercials are absurd, trying to be funny, intentionally annoying, and often violent. Realities become manifested, and a given product rises into the new throne of power as the major supplier of this drug or that. Itʼs all in advertising, they say. Once a major detergent corporation thought themselves to be so imbedded in the American psyche that they stopped their constant ads. Their sales dropped to nearly nothing almost immediately. It is the artist who creates the imagery and scenarios that keep these corporations alive. Advertising that does not use some creative, active spirit to design their ads are painfully visible to the public, and do more harm to their sales than good. My point here is not to blame artists for the advertising worldʼs existence. People, especially new parents, do whatever they need to do in order to create a life for their families. My intention is to make clear that the artists are being used by whoever is in power to channel the creative powers that artists possess in order to manifest realities, just as artists did in the cave-dwelling days and when the Church ruled most lands. At the same time, in the same society, the arts are made out to be of no serious consequence to anyone, de-funded from schools, while most artists cannot stay alive by sales of their art work alone.

We have reached a time in human consciousness wherein the artist and society are beginning to value their own spiritual awakening more than the billions of objects that society believed it desired and needed. Inner peace and spiritual Self Knowing are becoming increasingly important to our survival as a species. Unconsciousness and fear have been allowed to run their course, have been given enough rope to hang themselves, yet we forgot one detail: they are too unconscious and fear-driven to learn their lesson once they have hanged themselves. New ones eagerly step up and replace the recently self-hanged. Therefore, consciousness, spiritual awakening must stand and make its light visible and assume its influence over fear and unconsciousness. Only genuine compassion and caring for ourselves and for one another can restore this world to where it must be in order to survive. It is a time, in short, when the creative spirits of the world, who now number more than ever imagined, must use their ability to manifest a reality that is love-born, that serves us as a recognition of our spiritual nature. If artists have been