The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation

A good, 'feel-good' art book of the kind that makes me lazy: it's so much easier to read about drawing than it is to pick up a sketchbook. Franck sees drawing as a Zen practice close to meditation, and much of the book is about the way he sees the world and tackles it with his pen, with personal insights that he intersperses with comments from Zen masters. I'm not sure you could learn to draw from this book, but it has inspired me to look a bit more carefully at what I do when I am drawing.

This book shows us how racticing an Art is a form of meditation. The author introduces us to Seeing/Drawing as an experiential approach to reality. Seeing as an exercise of mindfulness. As an act of letting experince wash over us without reacting to it with desire or aversion. A really good book i would recommend to anyone and not just an artist.

Zen of Seeing is not a how-to book. No drawing lessons here. Instead, pleasant drawings and inspirational messages (hand written) encourage the reader to let go of rules and inhibitions.

Seeing/Drawing is a way of contemplation by which all things are made new, by which the world is freshly experienced at each moment. It is the opposite of looking at things from the out-side, taking them for granted. "What I have not drawin, I have never really seen," says Frederick Franck, and he goes on to show that "once you start drawing an ordinary thing, a fly, a flower, a face, you realize how extraordinary it is-a sheer miracle..."

For Franck Seeing/Drawing is a spiritual discipline, a "Zen method" admirably suited to the active temperament of Western people. Even if you have never thought of drawing, if you claim to be one of those people who cannot draw a straight line, this book will make you want to pick up a pencil and show more begin...to SEE.

Frederick Franck, whose drawings and paintings are part of the permanent collections of a score of museums in America and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Fogg Museum, and the Tokyo National Museum, is an uncommonly versatile man. He holds degrees in Medicine, Dentistry, and Fine Arts. For three years he served on the staff of Dr. Abert Schweitzer at Lambarene. He was the only artist to record all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). His many books deal with Africa and Albert Schweitzer, with life at the Vatican, with religious experience, and with his concept of drawing. In memory of Pope John XXIII, for whom he has unbounded admiration, he converted the ruins f an eighteenth-century watermill near his house in Warwick, N.Y., into "Pacem in Terris," a "transreligioius place of inwardness." Among the artistic, spiritual events at "Pacem in Terris" are performances of Franck's own modern version of the ancient Play of Everyman. show less