Category: Buddhism

So if you talk to yourself, what do you say? Me? I beat myself up or go on about everyone else is a nudnik. Buddha’s rules for social media that speech should be kind, true, timely and useful eliminates 99% of my self talk and most of my speech. Figuring out what to say to oneself is even harder than talkiing to others.

Meditation isn’t just emptying the mind. The mind is a garbage can that fills itself right back up again. Meditation is directing the mind to pay attention to one object. Self-talk is used to direct the mind towards what you should be paying attention to. This is called verbal fabrication used right it puts you into to control of your mind. and to name what the body is experiencing as you direct your attention. Meditation isn’t emptying the trash, it is building a peaceful house to live in.

Meditation is like drawing and a craft, in this case applied to your mind.

Once you realize that right speech eliminates the crap in your head what exactly do you apply the speech too? This is where it becomes important to learn the craft, figure construction, storytelling, composition and design. Often this involves study of other artists and understanding what exactly you are swiping from Jack Kirby. It’s easy to just stick Kirby Krackle and shoving big hands at the camera in your own work and claim that’s Jacks craft.

By being able to learn techniques you can apply them to what you are trying to do. I’m studying Peter Arno (an old New Yorker cartoonist) to see how he stages a scene. If I can put labels and define his work with words then I can encourage myself to use that to focus on.

Analyzing work not just copying it as a way to do things makes it easier to repeat and think about it. Not that I’ve figured out how to do this very well as I work on it. It’s fun to do things (draw, meditate) it’s much harder to learn how to take things apart and see how they are working.

So when you set an intention how long does it last? Mine lasts until I need chocolate, sometimes a few minutes sometimes a few seconds. When I meditate I set my intention to paying attention to my breath. That intention sometime makes it to the end of the breath. Then birds, bees, the neighbor outside my window chatting, the pipes in my house burbling, the intention lasts about as long as the second breath usually.

Like Buddha said nothing is permanent. Once the intention goes so goes the attention too flying out the window after it. To stay in one place I have to constantly reset that intention over and over again. At the end of each breath there is a pause before the next one starts a nice place to ding my moron brain and tell it to watch that next breath come in.

Now drawing comics, each panel can serve as a disturbance to whichever panel I’m working on, each background can disturb the attention on the one figure, a hand can distract from a face. It’s amazing I ever draw any comics at all because there’s so many ways to lose focus. And look over there chocolate looms to wipe everything out. And don’t get me started on what politics will do to my focus.

So how do you make a comic happen in any way shape or form. You break it down into steps. The more you analyze your own work the more steps you can find, When drawing storytelling focus on large simple shapes with a dead line in panels, when drawing a figure start with a stick figure construction move to shape a contour line drawing then value. In a crowd once you have it blocked out draw each face one at a time. Each shape value line or color you lay down set your intention to focus on the next one that is artistic right intention.

In Buddhism there’s desire and renunciation, renunciation giving up of things for a greater happiness. If we follow our desires around we only end up wanting more, how many comics do I have and how many more can I get? In drawing comics commercially the first desire was always for more work, financial success of big royalty checks, movie deals fame and fortune. These often conflict with the ideals and desires of a young revolutionary who thought I could promote world revolution with comics.

On top of this I had my own artistic interests that took me far outside what any publisher was interested in. When I went to art school I had all these mature, sophisticated cool teacher of 35 to 40 who taught the first year Illustration students, life drawing, composition and color and design. They sent us off to Soho (it had galleries once), The Met and the Modern. I went into art school thinking Barry Smiths’ Conan was the highest achievement of western civilization. Came out of art school wanting to do comics that integrated Kandinsky, Klee and Albers and life drawing into super heroes.

The mission statement was set and my destination was out in front of me. Everything since has been figuring out the path.