The Awakened Eye: A Companion Volume to the Zen of Seeing, Seeing/Drawing as Meditation

Wants to the extraordinary enthusiasm with which his previous book was received, Frederick Franck has written more and in greater depth about the spiritual aesthetic approach he calls seeing and drawing as meditation. In this meditative discipline, the hands learn to mirror what the eye perceives without the intellect interfering. Instead of our habitual looking, we begin to recover the lost art of seeing, for through the act of the drawing we see living things around us, and ourselves, with a new awareness. Each stroke, each dot upon the paper is a precise measure of the quality of that awareness. Hence seen and drawing as meditation does not require any previous art training and can be practiced alone. The author includes in this book a vividly written workshop for those unable to attend one of the live workshop retreats that he is conducted all over the United States. This is also a refresher course for those who have attended and are now on their own. The author’s drawings and paintings are part of the permanent collections of more than a dozen museums in America and abroad. He is an uncommonly versatile man.