Welcome to Jessica’s #MeMeditating account – part of our #MeMeditating series, where students share their real-life stories of how Vedic Meditation affects their lives.
Brooklyn-based artist Jessica shares a fascinating insight into how Vedic Meditation has impacted her creative process as an artist.
I’m Jessica.
Prior to learning Vedic Meditation I’d been succeeding as a professional artist, showing and selling my paintings for close to a decade. However, once I incorporated meditation into my daily life my career jumped to another level. I began gravitating towards collaboration and community action, adding a new dimension of involvement with organizations and causes I believed in. Making art in the sanctity of my studio was safe and blissful but meditation propelled me to step into the unknown, taking risks in ways I hadn’t before, which was, and continues to be, profoundly rewarding. This included creating art events, teaching workshops, giving artist talks, curating exhibits, and sharing on social media all of which, in effect, allowed the themes in my work to expand and reach more people. One specific example would be working with a non-profit group to co-create a public art piece that functioned as an outdoor art studio to host art workshops and educate the community about the surrounding environment.
Feeling more able to toggle between my studio and my outreach resulted from the meditation practice of touching into both the collective consciousness and my individuality. Finding this balance also made me more inclined to share my creative process, garnering feedback that revealed ways in which my work resonated with viewers.
With regards to my art making process, meditation instilled a slowing down, an ability to sit with the unknown longer, resulting in my exploration of new twists and turns in my work as opposed to pictorially flattening, overworking, or rushing a work to a known end. This increased ability to pause, step back, and return to the source has proven to lead my work in a more authentic direction. Furthermore, meditation has fine-tuned my senses, increasing my ability to render more sensitively; refine the line quality in my drawing and detect greater subtleties in colour, tone, and temperature. In my compositions I’m encouraged to create larger quiet areas and negative space, and I also have a deeper understanding of universal principles such as “lost & found edges” (allowing contours of a form to both emerge from and disappear into the background), which empowers me to use such techniques more adeptly.
Check out Jessica’s work here.
