The Art Grind Podcast Episode 74: Jason Patrick Voegel
I was listening to the Art Grind Podcast on Spotify… well I’ve listened to them for a while. Still, I always get stuck driving trying to fumble through the episodes because it’s filtered newest to oldest. So the search goes up, not down, so instead of episode 73 to 72, I have to manually choose it before it automatically moves to 74. And I had a totally “duhhh” moment recognizing that I could just switch the filter. For all my technical thinking it never occurred to me to try that. 😅🙄
Anyway, yesterday I made the filter switch from newest to oldest and it went to the very second episode, normally people say “the very first episode”, but there was no first on the list, anyway the second oldest episode of Art Grind in which Jason Patrick Voegel talks about his life in arts. I was driving home from my doctor's appointment on a three-lane highway with no one around me on this particularly long stretch, lost in thought between how much it sucks to be unwell for so long and the discussion they were having.
Jason, Marshall, a woman who wasn’t the current Sophia who helps interview but her name might have been Sophia or Sarah was also on it. They were discussing a particular point I wanted to write about.
Jason was saying that art is a lot like zen practice as he remembered his time in gymnastics as a boy and his more recent art practice in that he has a singular focus that occurs when he is at the work making the thing, and it does change but he has a vision of himself making what he wants to see. There’s a breath practice he has but not always but he has it, there is a singular focus he also brings in, and there’s a particular state he reaches, a flow state as the new age people call it, I'd like to add a different take on that, it’s different for me because of the focus being on a subject outside myself makes me work differently.
Marshall was also talking about studying the figure and trying to look at it without bringing preconceived judgments about it while translating it. There is some value and validity to that. However, I have found a huge difference between studying an external subject and an internal subject.
When I’m not thinking and I’m watching my mind's eye create it communicates what it is most concerned with. It could be an emotion, an underlying root pain, or maybe a subject that has been holding my attention recently; it’s only after some time of making loose, flowing shapes along the picture that images start to appear. I don’t start with an image outside myself and then work to translate it onto a two dimensional plane.
Then I start to see the buildup of structures and symbols of meaning I am either desiring to communicate with, dealing with, or connecting to, consciously or unconsciously. I think that is my own meditation whereas when I study an external object I’m considering a lot of different components.
The likeness or how close it looks to what I’m looking at without focusing on making it the way it looks. (that’s a trap for me in my mind, which is my own desire of wanting to be validated.) The lighting, the angle, how it is framed on the paper, I could go on… proportions, color… ok I’ll stop now.
For example, I got an idea of how much I have to do to separate myself from the external object, went to meet Betty Edwards and took her Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain workshop; then it was taught by her son, Brian. One of the principles that is taught in the book and the exercise we did was to flip the external image upside down, cover it and slowly and methodically continue to draw all the small unitienditifed lines down the page till I was done and we actually made something more accurate because I was unaware of what it was I was making.
Add to that process the principle of “not naming the thing,” just saying “this is a curve or an angle or a shape.” That way we further distance ourselves from the external subject, which frees me from the image I am trying to make and consequently I end up getting closer to making the thing I am looking at… phew!
I know there was a point to that long digression… Oh Yeah!
It’s that an external drawing requires a huge amount of intellectual knowledge, along with hand-eye coordination. It’s a different kind of meditation. Actually I’ll write something that may be controversial.
It doesn’t start very zen for me. I think it can lead to zen. But art is a discussion; it is an expression; it’s evidence that had movement within me transferred to paper. I’m not sure why, but I attribute zen to being already in a still, peaceful state, even though the definition supports what Jason was saying. I just don’t think it encompasses it entirely for me. If anything, art is more like inefficient yoga for me, because while yoga moves my whole body to obtain stillness, art is a very fine small-motor-skill movement that constrains my body to very finite image-making across a fixed plane.
That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy making art; if I had been in the discussion, this is the point I would have added. It's not a criticism of the discussion; I wanted to add a point, but the conversation was created in 2017. It’s now 2025; I cannot, but I’m adding it here to continue the discussion or add to it like a painting or drawing that’s been put away for a while, and I want to add to it.
